Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Adam Parrish was walking.

He walked with a deliberate pace, one scuffed leather sneaker in front of the other, measuring each step as though a misplaced footfall would release a trap door, send him tumbling through the ether of his blackened heart, his disobedient mind. It wouldn’t stop, it was stuck, replaying their last phone call, the desperate plea in Ronan’s voice. His unholy silence when something Adam said had revealed Declan’s betrayal. Adam’s betrayal.

He hadn't meant for it to be a betrayal.

I just wanted to keep you safe.

I just wanted to keep you mine.

Adam kept walking, because if he stopped walking, his misery would catch up to him, and he couldn’t have that. He needed to think.

How many sleepless nights, when before, sleep had been too precious a commodity to waste? Before shopping carts and sweat-drenched summer evenings, before squealing tires and sleeping cows and the dangerous smirk that curled only in the corner of Ronan’s mouth. Sleepless, because his carefully constructed future was hurtling toward something far more frightening, far more appealing, far more vulnerable, far more alive.

Sleepless, when Ronan was not dreaming beside him, when his tiny attic bedroom was cold and his chest was warm and his throat ached with the fullness of it all, with what they were becoming, Adam-and-Ronan, Ronan-and-Adam. Trying to convince himself that it was too good, it was too fragile, it was too hard to hold onto. That it didn’t fit the plan.

He would nearly manage it, until he heard the roar of a beloved BMW’s engine pulling up to Boyd’s, saw the fire that lived in Ronan’s eyes, felt the early morning mist of the Barns on his skin. And then he’d pull Ronan roughly into the most convenient corner and kiss him until he forgot to think, mouths and hands and heat and tongue, Adam-and-Ronan and Ronan-and-Adam, one and the same, complete and compatible and not at all marching steadfastly in two different directions, a few months, a few weeks, a few days from now.

And now?

Adam’s phone rang, shrill, in the cold, early morning.

He did not check; he knew who it was. Adam lifted the phone to his hearing ear without speaking.

Declan Lynch did not waste time on niceties either, they were months and miles and a shared dreamer past that. “You got something for me?”

Adam wondered dully if he hated Declan, or if talking to Declan was just too much like looking into a mirror for Adam to ever do anything but endure a conversation with him.

“The ley line’s still gone,” he said. How many days now? Every morning, Declan’s call. Every morning, the same answer. “Everywhere. No change.”

He dreaded the next question, even though Declan never finished it.

“Any word from…”

Still gone. No change.

“You know where to find me,” said Declan Lynch, impossible like every Lynch, and hung up the phone.

Adam kept walking.

Adam was walking, his daily rounds, from his dorm first to the oldest tree in Cambridge, a twisted gargoyle that was no more willing to give up its secrets today than when he first tried to scry there, in this staunchly unmagical city he’d chosen for himself, the one that refused to be called home.

Home was rolling green and lush with life and energy, and Adam ached with the knowledge of it.

He didn’t know if he was allowed to call it home anymore.

Adam kept walking. He walked for a long time.

He pulled out a key and opened the door to the auto shop where he worked on weekends. He did not stop walking until he was in the damp in-between, the mostly-forgotten corridor he’d discovered only because he’d been looking for ley line energy, and found it here, wedged in between the past and the present.

Found the ley line, and found this. He knew now that it was called a sweetmetal.

The mural was mostly-forgotten too, painted lustily on cinder blocks, something winged and clawed and not nearly as magical as the energy that hummed from it, even now, when Adam’s senses felt muffled and heavy with the deadness of the city around him. He’d come here to scry, before, the ley line strong enough here to let him reach out and grasp the endless magic he’d left behind in Virginia, the Adam Parrish he’d left behind in Virginia.

There was nothing to reach for now. It was gone. It was all gone.

“Ronan,” Adam said, a broken voice in the dark. It was a plea. It was an accusation. A curse, all at once. He might have been praying.

The sweetmetal’s magic taunted him. He’d been scrying, or attempting to, stupidly, in his dorm room, when the ley line had left him. It had left him, just as he’d glimpsed Ronan from the corner of his eye, or something masquerading as Ronan, twisted and ashen. He’d stretched out a hand—or what passed for one, when you were mostly a consciousness—and then he’d found himself blinking, into a flickering brightness that was too harsh, too wrong, too real.

His wakening had been nothing like the long journey back into his body when he ended his scrying on his own terms, nothing like the violence of drawn blood and blades when he didn’t. He’d simply—opened his eyes. He’d been Adam Parrish, magician, uncanny, and then just as quickly, Adam Parrish, Harvard student. Unremarkable.

The ley line was gone.

Ronan was gone.

Please.

Adam didn’t know how to pray. He didn’t know who to pray to.

There was a furious burn behind his eyes, and he swiped his hand across his face. He turned his back on the sweetmetal.

“Damn you,” he whispered.

Adam kept walking.

Chapter Text

Tick. Tick. Tick. The plastic hands of the lecture hall’s clock marked the time with proud efficiency, unaware that they were unremarkable, that they were cheap and factory-made. At the front of a room full of America’s best and brightest, a hundred of them at once, one lone professor spoke with passion about Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state theories, and ninety-nine pairs of eyes slowly glazed.

One pair was sharply focused, not on the venerable professor, but on the finely crafted watch on his own wrist.

It was metal, though it would be tricky to hazard a guess at which kind; the curves of it glowed softly, subtly, when he moved. Not enough to draw anyone’s attention but his; enough to assert that it was in fact a remarkable timepiece, made only of dreams and desperate hope.

It had been a gift.

Think of me.

Ronan hadn’t said it, but Adam had understood.

The slender metal hands of the watch were still, unmoving. They had been that way since the night Adam had last heard Ronan’s voice.

Someone coughed, and Adam tried his Harvard best to appear riveted by the minutiae of the nine component states of achieving flow. He made a note in his notebook. He crooked a smile when Gillian glanced his way, rolling her eyes in response to something that the oblivious professor had said, that the oblivious Adam hadn’t cottoned onto.

“Mr. Parrish,” the professor called his way, when the lecture had blessedly ended and America’s best and brightest were crowding out, speaking of booze and babes and last night’s frat party on their way out the door.

Adam slowed, obediently.

“I’ve been asked to submit some names for students to volunteer at the Socio-Economics conference here next weekend,” the professor said, gathering up his haphazard notes, dropping half, unnoticed. He really was a wrinkled old shirt of a man. “The theme this year is right up your alley, judging by your last paper. Can I put you down for it? A great opportunity to network for a bright young freshman like you. Looks good on the resume, too.”

“That’d be wonderful, sir.” Adam said, with his most Gansey-esque smile.

Adam was lying.

“-dam!” came Gillian’s voice, startling him as he turned the corner in the hall. Adam’d had half a hope that she had gone on to the dorms without him but she’d snuck up on him instead, on the side of his deaf ear, which he hated more than most things. There was something nearly predatory in her eye.

“Hey,” said Adam, without a trace of discomfort.

“So you remember Juan, from psych class last semester?”

“Sure,” said Adam. “I saw him at Weld last week.”

“Oh that’s interesting,” Gillian said, relishing this new piece of the puzzle she was clearly constructing in her mind. “Well, he wanted to know if you were still with your scary goth boyfriend from Virginia, or if you were more on the market these days.”

Lead, in his stomach. “What’d you say?”

“I told him you kicked farmer boy to the curb after he trashed your dorm room. Then he asked if I could give you his number.”

The gleam of his wristwatch drew his eye. Its hands were still, unmoving. Gillian waited expectantly.

“Yeah, alright,” said Adam. “Why not? I’ll send him a text.”

Adam was lying.

Gillian was enormously pleased with herself. She chattered on while they walked, which Adam was grateful for only because she seemed satisfied with non-committal hums in response. His eyes fell upon his motorcycle, another impossible gift, another impossible dream, waiting patiently for him in the dorm parking lot. His fingers itched, remembering how it had felt, that one autumn day he’d let himself do instead of think, that one joyous ride through the dark, straight into Ronan’s arms.

Hadn't Adam come to him? Hadn’t he tried? Eight hours there, eight hours back, on a dreamed motorbike he barely knew how to keep upright. Hadn't he pleaded?

“I’m coming back. Be here for me.” Let's do this together. Wait for me.

Ronan hadn't waited.

Gillian left him at the stairs, and Adam found his dorm room blessedly empty. He placed his messenger bag neatly on his desk chair, and collapsed onto the bed. On the ceiling above it was a sickly yellow-green stain, neatly splattered in the vague shape of a crab. He’d scrubbed and repainted the whole of the room, and when he’d laid down in his bed for the first time after giving back the paint and the rollers and the tarps and the cloths, he’d put his hands over his face and laughed, because if he didn’t laugh he’d have cried instead. He still hadn’t managed to purge it entirely.

His phone rang. Adam’s chest fluttered in reaction, but it was Gansey calling.

He hesitated before answering.

“I haven’t heard from him,” Adam said, when he did. “Nothing has changed.”

“Oh, Adam,” said Blue. They had him on speakerphone.

“Helen has her best people looking,” Gansey said, businesslike. “They’ll find him.”

They would, eventually, Adam knew. Or someone would. A lot of people were looking for Ronan Lynch.

“He’s still alive,” said Blue, stubbornly. “I know he is.”

The hands of his watch remained steadfastly unmoving.

“I know,” said Adam. “You’re right. He has to be.”

Adam was lying.

“Do you want us to fly there?” Gansey asked, not for the first time.

“There’s nothing you can do here,” said Adam, shortly. “I have school to keep me busy. I’m fine.”

Adam was lying. This time though, at least they knew he was.

There wasn’t much more to say, so they ended the call. Adam considered mustering the energy to join the Crying Club in the cafeteria for dinner, maybe a round of Repo in the common room afterward. Instead, he rolled gracelessly from the bed and filled his electric kettle, the numbers on it so worn they were no longer legible.

He tried to read his sociology notes as he spooned up glutinous lumps of Easy Mac from its flimsy container, but each mouthful he swallowed sat heavy in his stomach. He caught himself picking at his hands again, and balled them up tightly. He’d long ago run out of the little jar of dream ointment he’d found tucked in the dash of the Hondayota that had faithfully wheezed its way to Cambridge once, and then died for good. He’d pressed the jar to his forehead when he’d found it there, one last gift; pressing the knuckles of his thumbs into his eyes, overwhelmed. Ronan would have driven him, but Adam had insisted on making this inaugural journey alone. It had not felt the way a younger, more determined Adam had always imagined it would—driving away from Henrietta, for good.

Because driving away from Henrietta now meant driving away from Ronan.

Adam pushed his sad supper away, and closed his eyes, banishing the glimmer of summer at the Barns, the memories that wanted to be looked at and cherished, that burned to the touch. He felt empty, as he always did now, with no ley line to reach for, no tether to ground him. He cataloged what he could all the same: the dull ache between his shoulder blades, the hollow ringing in his deaf ear.

It wasn't fair, it wasn’t fair, because Adam had been drowning in a sea of selves: Adam Parrishes who knew how to be the center of the hurricane, cool and collected, all eyes on him; Adam Parrishes who’d be down for a casual weekend hookup with some guy he barely remembered from class; Adam Parrishes who wanted nothing more than to make coffee runs for the venerable professors of the academic elite. Adam Parrishes whose mothers had spoken to them with kind words and whose fathers had touched them with gentle hands. America’s best and brightest, successful Harvard freshman, the man with the plan.

Somewhere in there had to be an Adam Parrish who could walk away from the storm that was loving Ronan Lynch and never look back again.

Physiological symptoms of a psychological malady: stomach churning, fingers ceaselessly picking... it wasn’t fair, because he’d constructed all these selves to be seamless, a house of mirrors of identity, and now the knot in his chest and the swelling in his throat threatened to reveal the falseness of all the rest. Enduring this endless purgatory of not knowing, but knowing regardless that Ronan Lynch had already made his choice.

The real Adam Parrish was the one with the broken heart.

His phone rang, again, and Adam opened his eyes.

“I need your help.”

For a moment, for half a breath, the voice on the other end was Ronan’s, and Adam squeezed his eyes shut in wordless prayer.

“Adam?” The voice was Declan’s. Adam had never mistaken one for the other before. “I need your help.”

Adam’s eyes fell to his watch. Its hands were still, unmoving. He closed his eyes, braced his hands against the desk to steady himself against the sick swoop of his stomach, against the faster-than-thought knowledge of what Declan was going to say next.

“I found him. I found him.”

There was a thread of relief in Declan’s voice, but it was drowned out by terror, and guilt, and exhaustion, and pain.

“Adam, he’s asleep, and I can’t wake him up.”

Chapter Text

Adam stood in the doorway of the auto shop in Waltham, shoulders hunched against the midnight cold. The rush of traffic filled his hearing ear, the roar of his own heart filled the other. He wanted Declan to get here; he wasn’t ready yet. Hours had passed since Declan had first called—they’d had to wait for the last mechanic to lock up before the path was clear. Hours for the nightwash to take hold, hours for Ronan to drown in it. But Declan was coming, and one thought crowded all others from Adam’s brain, splintered and shiny and loud.

He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive.

He shielded his eyes against headlight glare as Declan’s car crested the curb. He could see Matthew’s head of golden curls slumped against the passenger’s side window. Declan had been short on details, but Adam had filled in the blanks: the eldest Lynch now had two sleeping brothers to keep on life support.

Declan emerged from the driver’s seat, ending a call as he did. They stood metres apart from each other, two of the people who cared about Ronan Lynch most in the world, and surveyed each other in the dark. Adam knew how he looked: walled up, held close, drawn in. Declan, in contrast, looked wilder than Adam had ever seen him.

“He’s not going to last much longer,” Declan said.

“Then let’s do this,” said Adam, propping the shop door open.

He was not prepared for what it would mean, to open the back door of the car, to see Ronan there, curled and vulnerable, chest rising, thick black liquid streaming from his nose and ears. For their last touch to have been a gentle press of lips goodbye, for the next to be Adam hauling him bodily from the car, hands under armpits, Ronan’s head lolling dangerously as Declan picked up his feet. Adam maneuvered them through the body shop to the only place he’d known that’d had everything Declan had wanted: a powerful sweetmetal, and secrets to keep.

He could feel Ronan’s heart beating; his own raced at double the speed.

“How’d you know this place existed?”

Adam was a liar, he had no intention of starting to tell the truth now. “Lucky guess.”

“You must have a lot of luck.”

“I do a lot of guessing.”

Adam slumped against the hidden mural, depositing Ronan as gently as he could upon the dirt-packed ground, and then retreating as far as he could in the enclosed space. Declan turned on his phone’s flashlight, shining it at Ronan first, his skin stark and pale beneath the nightwash and the lines of his tattoo, and then taking in their surroundings.

Adam turned away. He felt nauseous, he wanted to leave. No, he wanted Declan to leave.

Declan’s voice spoke again, garbled.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

Adam let out a slow breath. “Sorry, I’m deaf in this ear. What did you say?”

Declan swung his flashlight toward Adam. Adam squinted back at him, just a dark-shrouded figure with an accusatory light. Adam did not look at Ronan.

“Why is there this double wall situation?”

“I reckon…” No, that wouldn’t do. Adam started again. “I suppose they did it when they were building that addition upstairs. Needed a bigger footprint to support it. So this was the exterior wall, but now that’s the new exterior wall. The painting—mural—would have originally faced the street.”

Declan shifted the beam once more to illuminate the corridor. Ronan’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell. As Declan had hoped, with a powerful enough sweetmetal present, the nightwash situation seemed to have improved.

Adam couldn’t help it. He had to know. “Do you have any idea why he’s sleeping?”

He glanced at Ronan, and then away.

Declan bent to wipe the nightwash from Ronan’s face. “I was hoping you would know. My father can’t have dreamt him. He would have needed a sweetmetal all this time.”

And that was it, wasn’t it? Ronan was a dreamer, but Adam had never thought to consider the possibility that he might also be a dream. It could be done: Bryde, Ronan’s own progeny, was living proof. But if Ronan’s father hadn’t dreamt him, then who?

Ronan’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell. He was a dream. It should have shocked Adam, but instead it fit neatly into the construction of Ronan already in his mind; like he had somehow always known it. It was like learning that Ronan had dreamed Cabeswater: it made things make sense.

Ronan hadn’t known, he couldn’t have known. That was why Declan thought there was a chance Adam would, because there were no secrets between them, Adam-and-Ronan, Ronan-and-Adam.

Were there?

He caught his fingers picking at the back of his hand, he stuck them in his pocket and picked at the threads there instead. The faded mural caught his eye, the curve of a wing. He was struck by a thought. “Where is Chainsaw, by the way?”

Ronan’s beloved raven was never far from him. If he was sleeping, then she was too. Surely Declan had thought to—

“Farooq-Lane didn’t mention a bird,” said Declan.

Farooq-Lane, the same informant who’d fucked them all over, who’d put Ronan in a situation where he was as likely to be riddled with bullets as he was to be safely handcuffed away, who’d pushed him over the edge of the blade he’d been balancing on, dreamer on one side, humanity on the other.

No, we did that, said a voice in Adam’s head, not unkindly, but not shying away from it, either. I did that. At least, I didn't stop them. All he said was,

“Ronan will be pissed if something happened to her.”

Declan looked down at his sleeping brother. “Ronan isn’t in a position to make further demands on my time.”

Fuck you, Declan, thought Adam, but after an unimpressed pause, he said, “I’m going to give you the key to this place. Just come when no one is in the shop and you’ll be fine.”

Declan shone the flashlight in his eyes again. “How often do you have work here?”

“Oh no.” Adam had known Declan would ask, and Adam had weighed every possible answer in his heart, and Adam knew there was only one way he was going to survive this.

He attempted to school his voice into something frigid, detached. He failed miserably. “I can’t do that. I’m not going to…” He shook his head. Don’t ask this of me. “I showed you this place, but I can’t be the, like—” the widow, waiting patiently for her captain to come home from sea. “I can’t come here and…” play the coma patient’s faithful spouse, wondering if he’d even be remembered when they awoke.

The patient did not need a nurse. The captain had a mistress; he was never coming home.

“He was going to move here for you.”

Disappointment and judgment radiated from Ronan’s big brother, and Adam couldn’t stand it. Declan didn’t understand, of course he didn’t understand. To him, Adam was the villain in this storybook. Ronan hadn’t moved to Boston, he couldn’t have moved to Boston, but he could have waited. He could have called. He could have told Adam he was alive, told Adam he was fleeing the Barns and fleeing the law, told Adam he was confused and hurting and lonely and needed something more.

How many times had Adam sat in this very hallway, beneath this very mural, and scried? How many times had he followed Ronan into a dream, trying anything he could to get his attention? To get Ronan to hear him, to get Ronan to look? How many times had Ronan pushed him out again?

A year-long relationship, and Adam had been ghosted. By the first boy he’d loved and the only person in the world he’d ever let see the real Adam, the one who was imperfectly made, rough around the edges, a work-in-progress. Vulnerable.

Adam forced himself to look down at that boy again.

With the nightwash gone, Ronan could have been asleep at the Barns, dreaming beside him while Adam traced the lines of his tattoo, too keyed up from their love-making and the way it made him feel to sleep along with him. It hurt too much; he looked away.

“Look, Ronan chose his side,” he said, voice trembling, revealing more than he meant. “It wasn’t me.”

Declan was reading him intently. Adam didn’t like it.

“Ronan wasn’t himself,” Declan said. “He was under the influence of Bryde.”

Adam wanted to laugh, wanted nothing less. “He gets into trouble at school, you ask Gansey to fix it. Gets into trouble here, you blame Bryde.” For all that Declan complained about his brother, he was vying with Gansey for the title of King of the Ronan-Can-Do-Nothing-Wrong Club. “If anything, Bryde’s his victim. He was doing what he was made to do.”

Adam had given this a lot of thought, since the truth had become clear, turning it over and over in his mind. Could a dream be held responsible for the actions of its dreamer?

“Dreams are their own people,” Declan said, softly and un-Declanlike, a complicated look on his face. “They can make their own choices.”

“Too bad Ronan’s not awake to hear you say that,” said Adam, bitterly. He was usually a pragmatist, but in the Lynch brothers’ wars, he would always come down on Ronan’s side. He’d seen too much evidence of Ronan’s unacknowledged hurt to remain neutral. What right did Declan have to go all soft and un-Declanlike now? “There was a time it would’ve meant a lot to hear you say it.”

Declan chewed on this, when before he would have bristled. “At least,” he said. “I’m showing up now.”

They looked at each other, two of the people who loved Ronan Lynch most in all the world, and recognized one another.

“Yeah,” said Adam, grudgingly. “I guess.”

Ronan Lynch, dreamer and dream, a creature of magic, not of this world. Ronan Lynch, a boy who loved fast cars and loud music and teenage shenanigans that resulted in bumps and bruises more often than not. Ronan Lynch, for whom Gansey had warned “Don’t break him, Adam,” as though he’d needed the warning, as though he hadn’t understood the magnitude of what he was taking on, kissing Ronan Lynch, loving Ronan Lynch, being with Ronan Lynch.

In the end, it hadn’t been Adam who’d done the breaking.

He looked at his once-lover, lying there in the dirt. Ronan Lynch, the most difficult choice. The wrong choice. The impossible choice, entirely at odds with everything Adam had always told himself he’d ever wanted.

He’s an addiction.

His heart hurt too much. Ronan was as safe as he could be. Adam had to break free from it, once and for all.

It didn’t matter, anymore, that Declan was there. He crossed the corridor.

Crouching, he undid the band of his dreamt watch, and laid it across Ronan’s wrist. He lifted Ronan’s hand, gently, to fasten it. His palm was warm, alive, but his fingers were limp; unresponsive. It struck Adam then just how lonely he would be; curled against the sweetmetal wall. Adam’s fingers shook; his resolve held, but barely.

Adam traced his fingers along the scars on Ronan’s wrist, as he’d done many times before.

As he never would again.

Ronan was asleep, but Adam bent his head. His lips brushed Ronan’s ear, and even after everything he still smelled like Ronan, like being loved, like home. His lips parted.

No matter what they had been, no matter what they were unable to become, Adam didn’t want this end for Ronan. It couldn’t be the end, for Ronan.

So he said,

“Post tenebras lux.” Light follows darkness.

Please, he added, silently.

And then,

“Tamquam…”

I love you. I never stopped. I wish I could have followed you to wherever you are now. I wish you would have let me.

His declaration, his question, his assurance hung in the air, unheard. Ronan was sleeping, but the worst part was that if he was awake, Adam no longer knew what his answer would be.

He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, and drew himself away.

He did not look back as he held out the key to Declan, who took it as if it were contaminated with uncaring-assholism, horrible, self-serving, contemptible human being syndrome.

“Thanks for the temporary solution,” he said.

Fuck you, Declan.

Adam pushed past him, one foot in front of the other. “If you need more help,” he said, over his shoulder. “Don’t call me.”

He made it to the park on the corner before he stumbled. Gripping the roughness of the nearest tree, he lowered himself to the ground, bringing shaking hands to cover his face. He could feel the nakedness of his wrist without the comforting weight of Ronan’s gift. The night air was freezing; he barely felt it.

Adam was alone, again.

It’s better this way, he told himself firmly, but his chest felt tight all the same.

It’s better this way, he told himself firmly, but then he remembered that way Ronan had of smiling, secretly, a smile only Adam knew how to see.

It’s better this way, he told himself firmly, but found no comfort in the thought of the readings and card games and concerts and waffles and professors and Adam Parrishes waiting for him back on campus.

It’s better this way, he told himself firmly, this is what Ronan wanted.

It was this, and only this, that allowed him to rise, to put one foot in front of the other, until he stood next to the dreamt motorcycle that had started it all, the day they’d begun to understand that it wasn’t going to work, Adam-and-Ronan, Ronan-and-Adam. The beginning of the end.

It was only when he reached out a finger, to trace the stitching of his own name on the warm leather seat, that Adam began to cry.

Chapter Text

Adam tried to go back to Harvard and slip into the Adam Parrish snakeskin he'd left behind there—at least, he’d had every intention to when he’d turned his back on the Lynch brothers and walked out the door of that mechanic’s shop in Waltham.

But he woke up, the next morning, and found he didn't have it in him.

He just wanted to be quiet.

So Adam went to class. He went to the library. He went to the cafeteria for lunch. He took notes without raising his hand; he merely nodded when the girl at the reference desk called out a greeting. He sat next to Benjy and ate his spaghetti in silence, using stale garlic bread to mop his plate clean of sauce.

The problem was, the Adam Parrish that he had built for himself here at Harvard was not quiet.

The Crying Club was clearly troubled. Fletcher knew he’d been mysteriously out until the early hours, which meant the rest of them knew it, too. Gillian kept trying to engage him in conversation about lectures, or tarot, or Juan-from-psych-class. Eliot cast him a series of increasingly worried looks, shared over bolognese with Benjy. There was no scenario Adam could imagine in which he felt any desire whatsoever to confide in the Crying Club, his so-called friends.

He left them, gratefully, to sit in section, looking not at his notes but at the crows congregating on the nearest tree on the quad. They hopped and chattered, the warped window panes doing nothing at all to keep their harsh cries out of the storied Harvard halls he sat in.

It was a trap, he understood that now. A cage and a key. Under the vestiges of constructing a future, he’d built himself a prison instead. He thought of Ronan, dreaming helplessly beneath the painted sweetmetal, the slim metal watch Adam had left on his wrist. Ronan, just as trapped by the choices he had made.

By the time they were released into the late afternoon, Adam had made a decision.

The Crying Club had congregated outside the dorms; they were supposed to go to some trendy new taco place that’d just opened on Congress Street.

“Adam—”

Adam walked straight past them, and made for his bike instead. It was not that he hated them. He didn’t, really. He fiddled with the clasp of his helmet.

“Adam, you know you can’t fix him, right?”

This did make him stop, and turn his good ear.

Fletcher looked wildly uncomfortable with being the club member nominated to this task, but he persisted, the rest of them nodding encouragingly from afar. “You haven’t been the same since that night you went to Virginia, Adam, last Halloween. It’s like… you’re not really here with us anymore.”

It seemed Adam Parrish had not been quite as good a liar as he’d thought.

Fletcher swallowed, blundering in the dark, somehow stumbling upon something resembling the truth all the same. “He’s not good for you, Adam. What about the life you’ve built for yourself here? Hasn’t this always been your dream? Don’t you still want that?”

Adam remained very still.

“That,” he said. “Is a very good question.”

He put on his helmet, and swung his leg over his bike. The pretty little motorcycle with his name stitched into the saddle hummed to life beneath him.

Adam began at the Isabella Gardner museum.

Bryde’s batshit attempt to steal the most famous Klimt of all time had made the local news, although Adam had not initially made the connection from this bizarre, seemingly isolated incident to the evil mastermind he’d conceived of in his head. The more Adam learned about him, the less Bryde seemed like an adversary, a cultist, a threat to be eliminated.

Now he was just a sad and desperate dream.

Bryde and Ronan had been under the care of the same medical center when Declan had found them; he’d said police had discovered Ronan while doing a thorough sweep of the area following Bryde’s heist-as-performance-art spectacle—to them, just another unlucky victim of the mysterious sleeping sickness. There’d been no sign of any vehicle they might have taken to get there, and Adam knew that Ronan had left his beloved BMW behind when he’d first gone on the run.

The museum was large, part greenhouse, part stone mausoleum. Adam had never been inside and he didn’t go in now, instead walking the perimeter and scanning the streetscape to either side. A green square here, a side street there. A large and winding park with the Back Bay Fens, an offshoot of the Charles River, threading through it. Ample space to hide a sleeping body, and a sleeping raven.

Adam knew he could make this easier on himself, but hell if he was going to call Declan and ask if he knew exactly where they’d found his sleeping brother. Not after last night.

Adam was not a fool; he knew the chances of finding Chainsaw alive were slim-to-none, given the amount of time that had passed. A sleeping raven could be easily mistaken for a dead one, and swept up with the trash; a sleeping animal could not defend herself against one that was awake, and hungry.

He did not let himself think about what it would mean to Ronan if she were dead; he did not let him think about how Ronan himself was asleep and blissfully unaware of what state his raven might be in either way. He did not let himself think about the fact that yesterday, he’d taken off Ronan’s watch and given himself permission to be free, and today he understood that that Adam Parrish’s Harvard brand of freedom had been nothing more than a pretty mirage, made up by a man who’d thought he’d been starving for it.

He didn’t know how to wake Ronan, if a sweetmetal couldn’t do it.

He didn’t know how to be Adam Parrish without him. Not any Adam Parrish he liked, or liked to be.

He could continue sleepwalking through the life a younger, less lived-in, less loved Adam had planned for himself: Harvard University, success and money, politics and acolades, illustrious Aglionby alumni, the world’s biggest fuck you to the father and the trailer park that had bore and bred him into the world. He could continue to be miserable, and lonely, and stretched to the breaking point: all of the things he was before: before Gansey, before Blue, before Ronan.

Or he could scour the streets of Boston for the corpse of his ex-boyfriend’s dreambird.

So Adam walked, and turned over dead leaves with his feet. Walked, and toed through the refuse overflowing from trash cans. Walked, and peered beneath cars and park benches. Walked, and tried not to let the memories of happier times, now precious times, overtake him, because they were all he had left, and they were so sweet they burned.

It had been a cold night at the Barns, in February, maybe, when winter had begun to wear out its welcome, laying brown and grey and dull atop the hills and fields. It was the weekend, and Adam was awake. Between school and work and Ronan his sleep schedule was absolutely fucked, there was no help for it. Ronan hadn’t been to school since November, and the idea of Ronan Lynch on any kind of regular schedule was a laughable thing anyway, so their mileage varied widely between never sleeping at the same time and being completely in sync.

This particular weekend seemed to be an example of the former. They’d spent the afternoon in bed, still a new and daring thing for them, which had resulted in Adam, exhausted from a late shift at Boyd’s and an early weights class at school, dozing right through the evening hours. He’d grumbled at Ronan for letting him, once he’d emerged from his grogginess enough to remember the day and the time and the place, and found him feeding Chainsaw bits of cracker in the kitchen.

Ronan was unbothered; he was of the opinion that any sleep Adam managed to get was money in the bank. “Don’t let me wear you out so much next time, then,” he said, shrugging, and then grinning when Adam’s face grew heated in response. Ronan was usually the shyer of the two when it came to these sorts of things, but lately he’d been starting to let a little bit of sass into the bedroom with them, because he liked the way Adam handled him when he did. Adam gave him a shove, and stole the rest of his Zoodles. Their legs tangled together under the table.

But the result of this blissful way to pass Adam’s rare spare hours was that it then became well past midnight and Adam was still wide awake. He sat at Ronan’s underused desk, lamp turned away from the bed where his boyfriend slept, studying for the Classics exam he had on Tuesday, when he heard an insistent scratching from downstairs.

As it often did now, Adam’s mind went to night horrors and demons instinctively, but Ronan’s dreams, from the peaceful way he slept, seemed untroubled. Adam listened again, turning his good ear toward the stair. It didn’t sound like Opal, who had learned to sneak around quite well on her hoofed feet lately, but made a distinctive clopping sound in her boots all the same.

The scratching continued. There was something down there.

Adam looked at Ronan.

He went downstairs.

He followed the scratching, as it stopped and started, stopped and started, to the front porch. He couldn’t see shit through the window in the dark, so he gathered his courage and opened the door.

A flurry of black feathers drove him back into the house.

“Chainsaw!” he hissed, ducking as she doubled back and divebombed him, her flight path erratic, something odd and jarring about her cry. She circled the ceiling of the room again and then dropped, faster than usual, to the floor, one wing awkwardly angled. She paced, angrily chattering.

Adam knelt.

“Are you hurt, girl?” he said, in a soft voice.

She spit at him and jumped back when he reached toward her. He withdrew his hands, and they considered each other. The raven renewed her stilted pacing, clearly distraught.

“I can help you,” Adam said. “Let me help.”

Chainsaw did not stop moving, but eyed him warily. He had earned her approval long ago, because with the possible exception of Opal, she liked what Ronan liked, and Adam found that gratifying. But she was also an animal that wasn’t meant to be tamed, and he had always let her set the pace: a gentle squeeze of talons here, a clip of the wings there.

Her pace now grew frantic; she had begun to caterwaul.

Adam’s hands shot out and grasped her firmly, around the neck and wings, out of reach of her snapping beak. He tried to be gentle with the wing she was favoring, but as he held her the problem became clear: a thorn was caught there, and Adam was relieved.

This was a problem he could fix.

“Shhh,” he said, as she struggled, outraged at his presumption, and held fast. He stroked the back of her neck with his thumb, for a very long time, until her little body seemed to relax under his hands. He waited until she was entirely still.

“I’m going to take the thorn out now, Chainsaw,” he said. “You’ll feel better after that.”

He kept one reassuring hand around her body while the other performed the operation; it took no time at all. He released her, and she flapped into the air experimentally, coming to land on the back of the sofa, watching him closely.

She was so much like a real bird that it was easy to forget she was more like a piece of Ronan’s soul.

“Atom,” she said, in her strange bird voice, and Adam felt known.

“It’s okay, Chainsaw,” he said to her, quietly. “I’ve got you.”

He did not want to find her dead.

Adam searched for an hour, he searched for two. He finally came to rest on the curb opposite the museum entrance, pulling his thrifted but well-cut jacket more tightly around him, resigning himself to the awful idea of dialing Declan’s number after all. He sat and looked at the rows of cars along the street, not a spare parking spot to be found.

Except for that one.

Adam frowned. Cars trawled the street, clearly looking for a place to park, but something about this spot turned them away, despite there being no signage or painted lines to indicate it was reserved for something else. He stood and walked toward it. As he approached the vacant parking spot, he saw the shimmer of an outline of a pretty little car.

A sound emitted from him that was half-gasp, half-laugh. It had to be one of Ronan’s.

The pavement here was riddled with potholes, and one in particular was just next to the dream car, filled with mud and showing a clear path where a body had been dragged through it and up onto the curb nearby. Adam felt a wave of begrudging gratitude. If Bryde hadn’t had the foresight to move Ronan to a place where he could be found, in the event that he did not come back from his one-dream kamikaze mission, Ronan might still be in the backseat of his invisible car even now, rotted with nightwash, already drowned. Already dead.

He found her, just next to where Ronan must have been discovered, the grass still compressed, the soft ground dug up by dragging boots—Bryde must have laid her there beside him. She was nondescript among the fallen leaves, and debris from trees. Adam hesitated, and then touched a gentle finger to her chest.

She was alive, and for the first time in a very long time, Adam felt something wonderful and warm blooming within him, something that wasn’t worry, or fear, or heartbreak, or self-loathing. He lifted the raven, cradling her sleeping form against his chest, and he knew where he had to go.

“It’s okay, Chainsaw,” he said to her, quietly. “I’ve got you.”

Chapter Text

The mechanic’s shop in Waltham closed late on Thursdays, so Adam had time to kill. With no desire to return to Cambridge and deal with the fallout of his (admittedly, rude) behaviour toward the Crying Club earlier, he got on his dreambike and drove. Chainsaw was tucked securely into his jacket, next to his heart.

He was going back.

He was going back.

He was going back.

The Adam Parrish that had told him to take off that watch yesterday was still there, fretting, but his protests were subdued. The hum of the motorcycle Ronan had dreamed for him, and the steady press of his raven’s lungs against Adam’s breast, was drowning him out. He’d been sleepwalking through classes and card games and college for so long.

This felt like doing something real.

Adam stopped at a gas station for a two dollar egg salad sandwich, and to take a piss in the grimy bathroom. As he washed his hands he noticed the numbers that Gillian had written there yesterday, on his palm.

A phone number.

For the first time since she’d presented the idea, Adam played out the scenario in his mind. He’d text something inane, Juan-from-class would respond in kind. They’d meet up—for coffee, or waffles, or tacos, maybe—and Harvard Adam would make up some wonderful lies about how he got to be here, and what he wanted out of life. What he liked to do in his spare time. Juan might say something interesting, he might not, and the evening could go one of two ways: they’d decide they weren’t that into each other and part, or Adam would decide it was worth his while to go home with him instead. A meaningless hook-up, or the start of a by-the-book romance, wine and dine, meet the parents, happily ever after, two-point-five kids, divorce by forty, midlife crisis, start again. Close the book.

Adam found nothing remotely appealing about any of this. The ink on his palm was too stubborn to scrub out entirely.

His phone battery was on its last legs, so he stopped at a nearby surplus store to buy an electric lantern with a broken handle for next to nothing, and tucked it into his saddlebags. He whiled away a few more hours at the public library working on a paper for economics, mindful of the bundle tucked against his chest, thankful that at least a sleeping raven was relatively unobtrusive, as corvids go. The paper wasn’t going to be his best work; he was finding it hard to focus.

He was going back.

He was going back.

He was going back.

Adam arrived in Waltham at five to eight, and loitered nonchalantly in the park, watching his breath frost the air until he saw the last mechanic, Mitchell, lock up for the night. As he entered the building, he could no longer tell if the heartbeat he felt was Chainsaw’s or his own. It filled his ears, both of them, as he wrapped electric tape around the broken handle of the lantern, loaded it with batteries, and walked, one foot in front of the other, to the hidden corridor where Ronan lay.

He leaned over Ronan, holding Chainsaw close to his chest with one hand. Ronan looked much the same as he had last night, and even though the nightwash was gone, and he slept peacefully enough, it only made Adam feel guiltier to have left him alone in the dark like this.

He put the lantern down and sat down awkwardly, using his free hand to balance himself. Against his chest, Chainsaw began to stir, and then struggle, as she found herself waking up enclosed in an unexpected space.

If it hadn’t been for Ronan’s solemn, still-sleeping form before him, he might have felt like singing.

“Shh, shh, shh. You’ll hurt yourself.” He opened his jacket as slowly as he could, hoping not to startle her, then jumped when she bit him, a searing pain through his finger.

“Ow, fuck!” he said, as she shook herself free. “Easy.”

She let out a coarse protest before flapping up into the darkness; so much for gratitude. He could hear her exploring the limits of the room, her talons scraping against the walls.

“Look who else is here. Chainsaw. Look who else is here,” Adam swallowed, and then said the name only she was allowed to use.

“Kerah.”

She dived out of the darkness and back into the harsh light of the electric lantern. Adam kept his voice soft as he pointed; he didn’t know how she was going to react. “Look.”

She reacted with panic, once she realized he was not responding to her exuberant attentions. Chainsaw began to caterwaul, plucking at Ronan, then pecking at his fingers. When she began to properly bite them, Adam hastily leaned forward to capture her, shushing. Cupping his hands over her neck and wings, out of reach of her beak, he made her sit in his lap, facing Ronan.

Her fear was heartrending: she was an animal, all instinct and truth; she was expressing everything Adam couldn’t.

“Just look for a bit, okay? Give yourself time to take it in.”

She struggled for almost a minute, but he held her there, patiently, every so often stroking the back of her neck with his thumb, remembering that night at the Barns, with the thorn, the first time he’d realized she had a name for him, too.

“Shhh,” he whispered again. “He’s just sleeping. Like you were right before this.”

He hoped this was reassuring, for him it was only just. Asleep or dead, really what was the difference, if Adam didn’t know how to wake him?

He could not let his thoughts continue down that path. “If I let you go, will you behave?” he said at last, keeping his voice calm. “Don’t make me regret this.”

Slowly, Adam set her onto the packed dirt before him, not lifting his hands. She stood, fairly quiet now, until he released her, and then shook herself as if to imply she had never needed calming at all. Now Chainsaw began to play, gurgling, stalking back and forth in front of Ronan, plucking at his bootlaces, jumping on his chest, crabbing down his arm, and then pecking the dirt around him.

Adam watched her closely, the way she loved him, a reluctant smile tugging at his lips. It felt unfamiliar, smiling, like the muscles in his face were out of the habit of it. Chainsaw perched on Ronan’s boot and cocked her head at Adam.

“Atom,” she said.

Adam laughed a little. Even more unfamiliar. “Hi.”

He felt a little more settled. He repositioned himself more comfortably on the hard dirt floor, leaning his back between the framing on the wall opposite the mural, opposite Ronan. Their legs mingled, and Adam didn’t move away but grounded himself on that one point of connection. Chainsaw began to pick at the watch on Ronan’s wrist, the one he’d fastened there yesterday. Adam’s own wrist felt untethered without it. He sighed and leaned his head back against the wall, eyes closed.

He’d made the choice. He’d tried to sever the addiction. And here he was again.

“I guess I’m an idiot,” Adam said. His voice must have startled Chainsaw, because she jumped and dropped birdshit dangerously close to his hand. “Chainsaw! Come on!” He shifted away from her, then lifted his eyes to Ronan. “I know I said I wouldn’t come back. I did mean it. And it’s not like you don’t deserve it…”

He did fucking deserve it. Adam let the anger roll over him now; it had by times been hard to hold onto, these days and weeks and months of not knowing. One day they were together at the Barns, forgetting the horror of the Lace in each others’ arms; Ronan had kissed him goodbye and Adam had made the eight-hour return trip to Harvard thinking they were okay, they were figuring it out. They would make it work.

And the literal next day Ronan had left every piece of his life behind, Adam included, to chase dreams with Bryde and Hennessey.

Radio silence, from the most important relationship in Adam’s life, the only one that really mattered. Radio silence, as if he was some one night stand Ronan had gotten bored with. He leaned his head back, and made himself look at Ronan again.

Even in sleep Ronan looked ready to rise and fight; he always had. Chainsaw had hopped up onto his chest. She made a soft cooing sound as she bumped his cheek with her own.

Adam deflated; the anger subsided.

“But I kept thinking about Chainsaw, I guess. I knew she had to be near wherever they found you. If she wasn’t dead. Thrown out, eaten, whatever. I was in section and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had to at least look. And then when I found her—I can’t believe I did, she’s lucky she just looks like trash—I just kept thinking about how she’d feel to see you. I couldn’t put it down, that thought.”

Adam drifted off again. He didn’t know why he was speaking out loud, it was not a habit of his, but it would have felt odd to sit here in silence. Too much like mourning, with Ronan so pale and still. Too much like a wake.

He was praying, he supposed. Something like it.

What were the chances that Ronan could hear him?

Chainsaw flapped into Adam’s lap, and to stop her from picking at his buttons, he pulled a thread from the pocket of his jacket and gave it to her. She snatched it from his grasp and threw it over her shoulder, looking at him expectantly for more. He indulged her.

Radio silence, and not by Adam’s choice. He’d never gotten a say in the matter. What would he want to say now, if Ronan could hear him?

“Do you remember when I asked you what you’d do if you accidentally dreamt another me?” Adam asked him, abruptly. “I thought about it a lot after that. What I’d do to that other Adam. Would I let him live my life with me, like Hennessey? Would I kill him before he could kill me? But you know what I got to thinking? That copy exists. I made him. I am him. There’s a real version of me that stayed with you, I guess, that went out to Lindenmere every day and just learned everything he could about the ley line, about the something else. Or maybe who went with Gansey and Blue. Or who went to school in DC and came home every weekend. But this Adam killed those Adams so this one could win, this one who came to Harvard to go to class and write papers and buy waffles with the Crying Club and pretend like nothing bad ever happened to him and like he has all the answers.”

He’d been trying to still the compunction to pick at the nearly-healed scabs on the back of his hands, but now he scratched at one, unable to stop, until he could run his finger over the illusion of smooth skin beneath. Angrily he swiped blood away, frustrated with himself. Starting over, always starting over. New friends. New life. New Adam.

“I lie to all of them. I lie to Gansey. I lie to Blue. I lie to my professors. It’s like I can’t stop. It’s like I, it’s like… I don’t want this version to have anything the other version had, good or bad. So any time I need a past, I just make something up. New parents, new house, new memories, new reasons for how I lost my hearing, new me. I don't know what I’m doing anymore. Shit.”

Ronan, crumpled on the floor of this godforsaken in-between place. Ronan, laughing in surprised delight as they waltzed into the kitchen at the Barns. Ronan, lips against Adam’s ear in a darkened dorm room, looking entirely out of place there, feeling entirely like home.

“You were, like, the place I stored all the reality in. Then I had to start lying about you, too, and it just all, it just all…”

It got too big. It got too much.

He stopped then for a long time, looking off into the darkness.

Maybe reality was overrated. Ronan could dream himself any reality he wanted. Maybe Adam had just been trying to do the same.

“I found this place because I was looking for somewhere to scry. Declan wanted to know why I came and that was it. You know how there was no ley energy in Cambridge. I came close out here. A lot more than I let on.” Adam said. He hadn’t noticed until now, but his old accent was emerging, the words feeling comfortable and rounded on his tongue. It was Ronan, of course, that brought it out of him. It was always Ronan.

It felt like exhaling. He didn’t try to hold it in.

“I could scry here pretty good. I knew it was dangerous, I could get stuck out there, I knew there was that Lace out there, but I did it anyway. I wasn’t even looking for anything, I just missed it so bad, I just missed—”

He knocked his shoe against Ronan’s.

He missed the summer, those hot days and long evenings and firefly nights, Ronan’s hands roaming up his shirt, Ronan’s stubble scratching his chin. He missed the midnight drives, the wind, the terrible music that still sounded like sex to Adam nevertheless. The sidelong glances, the teasing smirks. He missed the dreaming: of Lindenmere, better than before; of the trinkets and baubles they created together, a puzzle they both enjoyed, where Adam’s logic and Ronan’s whimsy bore equal strength. He missed the magic, filling his veins and his breath and his mind, letting him disconnect from being Adam Parrish and find community with everything else on the ley line that lived and moved and breathed and wanted.

He missed being Adam Parrish.

What were papers and parlour tricks and poli sci next to all of that? What was Harvard Alumni Adam Parrish, working the same high-end job as everyone else, driving the same high-end car as everyone else, two point five kids and a divorce by forty, the trailer park kid that made it out, the success story, the footnote in the paper, living the life already tread by everyone else, laid out step-by-step in a straightforward line.

Why didn’t he want it anymore?

The backs of Adam’s hands were itching like crazy, so he squeezed them together, pressing and pressing and pressing to curb the urge to scratch. “I don’t know if I hate it here or if I hate that I don’t love it. I was supposed to love it. But I want to go—I think about it every day, just getting on the bike and going, and going, but where?”

There had only ever been one reason for Adam to go back home. It had never been the trailer park. Whether he left Harvard, whether he didn’t—where could Adam call home now?

His face was hot; his throat was forming a lump. He roughly rubbed the back of his hand against his eye. “Anyhow, so I can’t blame you that you lied to yourself about dreaming Bryde. ‘Cause I made this fake version of me, right, and I was wide awake when I did it. We’re both liars. I don’t know what to do. I miss…”

You. The Barns. Being Gansey’s magicians. The quest. He closed his eyes.

“I miss knowing where I was going.”

Then, he couldn’t stop it, it was like all of these words had been the dam. He cried, and it wasn’t wet but it was noisy, and he couldn’t get it under control. He gasped, again and again, sucking in each breath like it was his last, shattering it to pieces on the way out. Eventually he steadied himself, with shaky exhales, and after his shoulders grew still he sat there, worrying his fingers over his deaf ear, focusing on the deadened sensation of it. Gathering strength, feeling numb.

Chainsaw didn’t want to go, but as much as it pained him, he couldn’t leave her here, not while the sweetmetal was keeping her awake. Even with the general noise levels of the shop, it was too great a risk that she’d be heard, and Ronan discovered. Adam tucked her back inside his jacket, murmuring in soothing tones at her protest—she was not impressed—and gathered up the lantern. It felt heavier than when he’d come in.

He stopped in front of the door, not wanting to leave Ronan alone in the dark, not knowing what else to do. And then he heard it.

Tamquam.

It was Ronan’s voice, but Ronan had not spoken; Ronan was still asleep. Adam stared very hard at his body, then looked from side to side around the room. He felt disoriented; he was finally losing it, somehow; he’d reached his breaking point and now he was cracked in the head.

He’d heard the voice in his deaf ear.

What were the chances that Ronan could hear him?

Ronan did not wake; Chainsaw’s heartbeat was slowing against his. As he turned to go, Adam spoke into the dark.

“Alter idem.”

Chapter Text

One side of Adam was flooded with noise. The shrill whirring of tools, the revving of engines, the insistent beep of hydraulics, men in the same blue coveralls as him barking loudly at each other over top of the rest.

The other side was underwater, emptiness. Everything mellowed, and far away.

Adam had just finished changing the alternator belt on a Chevy Silverado and now he leaned against the shop wall, rubbing excess grease from his hands with a filthy rag.

He liked the work; it was the only part of Henrietta Adam he’d allowed Harvard Adam to hang onto. Primarily, at first, for practicality: his financial aid was not going to cover everything; he still needed an income, and this kind of job paid far better than the average cashier or busboy gig. Then, because the puzzle of a failing engine was sometimes just the thing, when you were treading water on an essay question about structural functionalism or psychodynamic perspectives. Then, because rubbing elbows with the blue-collared rather than the blue-blooded became an escape of its own kind, for a little while at least.

Then, because of the sweetmetal. Even with everything else deadened, its energy still called to him.

Adam closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the wall. Just on the other side of it, Ronan slept on, oblivious to the racket. Oblivious to the world, going about its oil changes and tire rotations without him. Oblivious to Adam.

Tamquam.

"What's wrong, Parrish? Girlfriend wouldn’t put out last night?"

Just a breath, and then Adam opened his eyes, and became Adam Parrish, Harvard frat boy. Endlessly ribbed by the proletariat workers he hobnobbed with in his spare time, a little bit haughty, but good-natured about it overall. He’d earned his fellow grease monkeys’ grudging respect with a recommendation from Boyd and the skills to accompany it, but they remained a bit perplexed about what exactly he was doing here, academic elite such that he was. Adam was not keen to illuminate the situation for them.

It was Mitchell who’d spoken, throwing his own grease-rag over his shoulder, he was always the worst of them. It was unfortunate that he was also the best-looking of them, but Adam supposed these things often went hand in hand.

“Dunno,” said Harvard Adam, by all accounts unbothered. “Maybe you should ask your mom.”

A couple of the other guys let out the appropriate guffaws at this, thumping Mitchell on the back as they passed. Mitchell grinned, and raised his hand to Adam for a fist bump. Harvard Adam dripped the appropriate amount of disdain at him, and then complied.

Harvard Adam had gleaned a lot of social cues from the Aglionby boys Henrietta Adam had despised. Blue-collared or blue-blooded, it didn’t seem to matter much when it came to crass humour.

“Shit, Parrish,” Mitchell said, shouldering past him, heading for the officer, where they kept the employee lockers. He was the same height as Ronan, just a little taller than Adam. He was built much the same as Ronan, all coiled muscle and restless energy. He smelled different, though. Cigarettes and deodorant, probably one called Masculine Fragility. “That’s cold, man, that’s cold.”

“So glad we had this talk,” Adam muttered, once he’d disappeared into the office. Net zero information. Net zero interaction.

“Parrish!” barked his boss Jimmy, over the din. “Connie needs me home early tonight. Can you finish replacing the rotors on this Mazda before you leave?”

It was framed like a question, but it wasn’t really. Adam was still the new guy, and that came with certain expectations. He stifled a sigh; he had two thirds of a psych paper to finish tonight. “You got it, boss.”

His fingertips were still stained black. He tossed the rag onto the workbench.

Later, when they had all gone, when the Mazda’s brakes were all shiny and new, Adam stood staring at that same wall, eyes unfocused as though he was scrying, as though he could see the sweetmetal mural right through it.

A voice in his ear, that shouldn’t have been there.

Tamquam.

"Copper,' he muttered to himself. “Nickel. Maybe a bit of steel.”

Adam turned, abruptly, and went into the night.

Some of the things he needed were harder to find than others. The stones he’d already sourced from the Arnold Arboretum, the Esplanade, or even from campus, collected over time as he wandered the city in search of the ley line’s energy. Nondescript little rocks he’d picked up and turned in his hand and slipped into his pocket, wondering if he was imagining what he felt within them, wondering if he was still a magician, or if he was just playing at it now. He’d had to search up several local shops of the witchy-gemstone variety before he’d found one selling a lump of copper of the size he was looking for. He was stuck on the nickel-and-steel for quite some time until he realized the most salient solution to that one was a quick stop at the nearest music store.

He returned to his dorm, to pack up the stones and a bottle of water and the bowl he usually ate instant noodles out of. He ran his fingertips along the softened edges of Persephone’s tarot cards, tucked in the pocket of his messenger bag, as they always were. He ran his fingertips along the unfinished essay notes, waiting on his desk.

He checked on Chainsaw before he left. He’d fashioned her as comfortable a nest as he could manage, once he’d found a big enough shoebox to poke holes into (someone in the building had recently had Chanel boots delivered, conveniently). He slid the box carefully from under his bed to peek inside. Her little breast rose and fell, rose and fell.

He thought about taking her with him, and then decided against it. There was too much uncertainty. There was too much risk.

He didn’t want to leave her there awake, and all alone.

Adam tucked her safely back inside her nest (not a coffin, he told himself, not for the first time). His stomach rumbled, and he thought about microwaving a pizza pocket, but decided against it. Hunger was the kind of sensation that was rooted in the body. It might serve him better to hold onto it, if he had very little else to tether himself to.

He picked up his bag, taking stock of his surroundings. Harvard Adam’s surroundings. It was all very bland, very rote. No personal photos on the bulletin board, no childhood stuffed animal on the bed, no posters on the wall. Just a carefully highlighted schedule, and a bi pride sticker, pressed into his hand at the 2SLGBTQIA+ society booth during student orientation. There had been a photo of him and Ronan pinned next to it, a Polaroid taken by Blue before she’d left at graduation. Her camera was a relic rather than a trend, the film for it subsidized by Gansey after much wheedling (on his part). Ronan had scoffed and pretended he didn’t want it, but Adam had taken it with an understood measure of gratitude. It was probably one of the only such photos in existence.

It was a good one, too. Ronan was pointing at the camera in a threatening manner; she’d caught him mid-gesture, full of movement. His eyes, though, were mirthful; his mischief was the loudest thing about him. Adam, for his part, was looking at Ronan, and the little half-smile on his face was one he’d never seen in the mirror.

At some point, after he’d realized the Crying Club believed he and Ronan had broken up the night he’d gone on his wild ride to Virginia (had they?), after he’d realized the path of least resistance was to let them keep believing that (hadn’t they?), he’d taken the photo down, and pressed it carefully between the pages of last semester’s soc book. It had felt, at the time, like a betrayal.

Tamquam.

He’d built himself a prison here. Adam turned to go, and then stopped short.

Fletcher was standing warily in the door. He looked at Adam’s bag, overfull, and then looked at Adam. His side of the room was a riot of colour and noise and life being loudly lived; he was framed neatly within it.

“Sorry I’ve been a dick,” Adam said, shortly. “It’s just… you know.”

How could he explain? The nightwash, the scrying, the sweetmetals. Ronan. Any of it. They looked at each other, the silence expectant.

“I gotta go to work,” Adam said.

“Sure,” said Fletcher, clearly disappointed.

Adam hefted his bag over his shoulder as his roommate stepped out of the way. In the doorway, though, Adam stopped.

“He’s not what you think he is,” he said, turning his head, not quite meeting Fletcher’s eyes.

Fletcher, against the blandness of Adam’s wall, looked unconvinced. Adam hoisted his bag higher, and continued on his way.

The streets were quiet, the shop unsettling, the odd silhouettes of the machinery creating monsters in the dark. Adam stood in the doorway of the hidden corridor for a very long time, before he lit the electric lantern. Then he sat next to Ronan for a little while longer.

Expectations to fulfill, scripted social interactions, predetermined roles to play. Adam Parrish, rags-to-riches, Adam Parrish, all-American success story, Adam Parrish, Harvard student against all odds. None of it meant a damn thing.

Who was he trying to prove himself to, now?

So he pressed his shoulder into Ronan’s and his hip into Ronan’s and his leg into Ronan’s, and tried to remember what it was like to be Adam Parrish, magician.

When he’d first met Ronan Lynch, Ronan had been mostly defense mechanism, forgoing falsities for cruelty but playing a constructed part all the same. Somehow, over time, Adam had found a crack in the fortress, or rather, Ronan had widened one for him. In that act—that first, brave question of a kiss—he’d invited Adam to be brave with him, to dismantle his own defenses, to be known, and Adam had made the leap. Once they’d become Adam-and-Ronan, two names spoken in the same breath, Adam had come to know what he suspected was a rare form of rapture, a precious form of joy—far more sparing than the songs and the stories would have him believe. To be understood, without needing to explain. To be undressed, in every sense of the word, to be stripped down and seen. Wholly himself, wholly unafraid. It was not always like that, but it was often enough.

He missed it.

He missed him.

He sat next to Ronan, and drew strength from the warmth of him, until he felt a little bit like that Adam Parrish again.

He began to arrange the assortment of things he’d collected in the dust.

“One, two, three,” he said, as he went. “Four, five, okay, six, seven…”

Seven stones, it seemed, would be just right. His bright, polished copper, placed just so. Adam had a knack for it, as Persephone had seen and nourished in him, he knew that he did. It was still there, a little sluggish from disuse, a little resistant, in need of lubrication. He hummed, and began to draw patterns in the dust without looking, translated directly from mind to arm. Sigils, to draw the power forth, to coax the sweetmetal into believing it was more than it was. To amplify, to lend strength, to bolster. Lines and dots and dots and lines, patterns internalized rather than taught, the language of the trees, the language of the forests.

Ronan’s language, some part of him whispered.

A voice in his ear, that shouldn’t have been there.

He kept on.

The guitar string, the bowl to scry with. The sweetmetal mural had begun to resonate, to hum in harmony with him.

Adam filled the bowl to the brim with a bottle of water and then walked out of the light to place the bottle out of sight, leaving nothing now but the pattern he’d created, the sweetmetal, and Ronan, sleeping between them. Stepping carefully, he sat in the middle of the pattern, then hovered his hands over the stones. He hesitated, moved them slightly, and then stretched over to place the bowl of water directly in front of him.

He knew that what he was doing was really fucking stupid. He could see Persephone’s black eyes, burning into his.

Scrying is never safe. You never know who you will meet.

Ronan never said anything about it, but Adam knew he hated when Adam did this on his own. He would have hated that Adam was doing this now. He might have loved it a little bit, too.

Fucking wake up and stop me, why don’t you.

Ronan did not wake.

“It’s too bad Chainsaw can’t be trained to bite me on command,” Adam said to him, a bit defensively. “Maybe she could, with enough time. Next project, I guess.” He frowned. “I don’t even know if you can scry with just a sweetmetal’s energy. I did what I could to make it better.” He fidgeted his hands over the stones again. “I’ve got to see if I can…”

Adam took a deep breath. In, and out.

He leaned over the bowl of water, which looked black in the dim light. He swallowed.

He looked into the water, and past it.

Scrying was something like meditation; it required a blank canvas of you. A surrender of self, and Adam Parrish was a cacophony of selves. It should have made it easier to let them go, maybe, the half-formed nature of them, but the harder he tried to twist free the harder they tangled him up, all those Adams, hanging on to what they could: doubt, fear, isolation. Safety.

His nostrils flared; his mouth worked.

There wasn’t enough damn energy here. The magician couldn’t find his magic.

Adam, said Persephone. Finish your pie.

Ronan slept on; Adam could not make him wake. He had to meet him where he was. He let out a long breath, and moved one stone to the left, another a little farther to the right.

Patience.

I’m coming, Ronan.

He tried once more. It might have been a long time. It might have been no time at all.

One last sigh, and he slid into unbeing.

Chapter Text

The boy was adrift.

He was moving through space, nothingness. No, not nothing, that wasn’t quite right. It was a sea without water, its currents made of lightning and swirling storms. It was dark, and dark again, but the darkness had shape and depth and movement, and sometimes, here and there, threads of golden light. He looked at the splintering, bubbling bits of himself, and saw that he was bright and golden too.

He was oddly shaped, and buoyant. He was a collection of fragments, none of which seemed like they should fit together. He watched as pieces of himself rolled just out of his reach; he spun with them, he wandered. Here was his happiness: at his high school graduation, at his new apartment over St. Agnes, at his Harvard acceptance letter, all of them tinged with something bitter to the taste. Here was his humour, casually cruel, often (but not always) warranted. Here was the want deep in his belly, a well-dressed man in a fast car, a boy who was and wasn’t Ronan at the checkout.

He knew these names, these places, these memories, but now that they were outside of him, their shape was unfamiliar.

Here was his anger, simmering quietly underneath cool logic; here was the distance he’d carefully measured out between his new life and his old. Here was his unguarded laughter, saved only for friends of the truest kind. Here was something in between the two, something that seemed true, but that he didn’t have a name for. This bright, round something seemed to look back at him, and he had the idea that it was something brand new, or disused for a very long time, that he could nurture and grow if he chose. A path he could walk, if he dared.

There seemed to be a lot of him, but he felt very small all the same.

Or maybe everything else here was just very big.

“Parrish.”

Something was approaching him, dark, and dark again. He attempted to gather himself, and found he could not.

All of the pieces of him turned to panic.

He was lost. He was losing himself. He was not meant for this place. He should not have come. He couldn’t remember why he had.

Panic.

He couldn’t remember who all of these disparate slivers of self were meant to assemble into.

Panic.

The darker-than-dark swirled nearer, and its currents seemed to bring the wandering bits of him a little closer. The thing was monstrous beside him, a Lovecraftian horror, a hurricane, or the eye of one.

He was a bug.

Then the monster spoke, with words he could understand.

“Parrish,” it said. And then, “Adam.”

Adam.

That was it.

A key in a lock. Adam’s sense of self resolved, and his physical form with it. He looked at his hands, human hands, and thought they’d never seemed quite so fragile.

I did it. I did it.

He was here, in this in-between place, so unlike the dreamscapes he’d wandered before, some world-forgotten layer between space and time. He was here, on the power of a sweetmetal and determination and nothing more, and he was here for a reason.

Ronan.

The darkness swirled and flashed, and Adam ducked his head, drifting away from its reach as subtly as he could. It was quite clearly a something, or a someone, and Adam was feeling a little too vulnerable in his current state to test whether that someone was benign. As he had this thought, he watched it form and bubble and unroll itself away. His human form began to fracture once more, into those round, bright little parcels that made up the sum of him.

Oh no, he thought, and watched that thought tumble away, too.

“No!” the darkness snapped at him. “You idiot! Stay close!”

The something before him did not sound at all mysterious or unknowable or like one might expect a massive, swirling, inhuman entity to sound. It circled around him again, pushing the pieces of him back together. Now Adam was Adam once more, and Adam was trapped.

This time, he tried to hold his panic in, to keep it hidden among the golden roundness of the rest of him.

“Are you trying to help me?” he asked, politely.

“I’m trying to keep you from dying!”

“I appreciate that,” said Adam. “But I think I’d better go.”

He attempted to slip away again, but there was nowhere for him to go. The monster began to laugh.

“Don’t you know who I am?”

Adam looked at the creature then, or tried his best to, when it was already all he could see. It was darker than dark, forked energy, but with the edges softened. It was not jagged, or checkered, and it did not feel the same as it had before, but Adam only had one other point of reference for giant, black, shapeless entities you might meet while scrying.

“Are you…” Adam said softly, afraid that to name it would grant it the same kind of power his own name had given him. He said it anyway.

“... the Lace?”

The creature exploded.

Adam flinched away, and maybe it was because he didn’t really have a body here, but no hurt accompanied the sudden burst of energy. When no further attack came, he chanced to look, to check himself over.

He could admit it, even if only to himself. He was afraid.

The monster, though, seemed to have settled itself, when it saw that it had frightened him. It twisted and swirled more than ever, still surrounding him, and as Adam watched this observation try to escape him, golden and round and drifting away, the monster moved to quickly gather him together again.

It was not the Lace, decided Adam. The Lace had been seething, hatred and disgust, unmistakable in the way it felt, in the way it looked at him and through him and wound itself up in the very threads of him, the things he hated, the things he feared.

This thing was not that. Now that Adam was gathered, it had withdrawn once more and was holding itself at a safe distance, like it didn’t want to scare him. It was a benevolent monster, it seemed to care, like it knew who Adam was and didn’t want him to—

“Ronan?” Adam said suddenly. “Are you Ronan?”

The monster said, “Yes.”

Ronan!

Could it be true?

Ronan!

This massive form, so unlike his own, this alien thing that rumbled power and crackled energy?

Ronan!

“Can you be smaller? Or tell me where to look? You’re everywhere.”

Words were tumbling from his mouth, but laughter followed them, wild and unbelieving, hardly daring to hope. He turned and turned and turned, following the shape of him, the lines of him, and tried to make it make sense.

The darkness compacted, as though Ronan was drawing himself together, making himself smaller, as Adam had asked. Now Adam could see him all at once, still swirling, darker than ever.

“Don’t fuck off too far, though, because I’m not holding you together right now,” he said, and Adam laughed again, because god, only Ronan could look like this and sound like such a dick at the same time. “Is this better?”

“I can’t believe it,” said Adam. “You look like—”

“I know,” said Ronan, grumpily. “The Lace.”

“No, I was just, you were just—you sound like a jackass. But you look like energy. It’s breaking my brain. Is it…” And Adam was struck by a thought, a terrible, horrible thought. “Or is it just showing me what I want…”

He trailed off, and looked at the thing that said it was Ronan. How could he know? How could he know? The exuberant joy he’d felt only moments before now turned to stone in his stomach.

He thought of that wild ride to Virginia, eight hours on a motorbike, imagining myriad versions of Ronan’s reaction but never once expecting the fear he’d been greeted with. Ronan, who’d just had cause to question his own reality, had doubted Adam’s, too. Adam had used logic then, to convince Ronan that it was really him, that he was really there, an unexpected birthday surprise, a wordless I-miss-you-and-us-and-this-so-much-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing-anymore, a spur-of-the-moment romantic gesture, not of which was very Adam-like—but still, very much himself.

But what was logic in a place like this? How could he know what was true?

It was hard to hold onto the thought.

“Don’t ask me to try to convince you,” said Ronan, or the thing that said it was Ronan. “If I were the Lace, I’d try to mindfuck you by telling you what I thought you wanted to hear. Use your own shit. Whatever you use when you scry other times. You’ve done this before without dying. Intuition. That’s the word. Use your intuition. What do you feel?”

Adam was listening, Adam was trying to listen, but he also thought maybe he didn’t have ears anymore, and he was fairly sure that he was watching his intuition bob away from him as they spoke. The Ronan-thing unfolded itself and surrounded him once more, until Adam’s stray thoughts had resettled and his form had resolved, and he was able to think clearly again.

Then it retreated, and Adam was reminded of a wounded animal. Or perhaps he was the wounded animal, and the Ronan-thing didn’t want to frighten him any more than it already had.

That was a very Ronan thing to do.

“Wait,” said Adam. He held out a human-shaped arm, relieved that it moved when he willed it to. “Don’t. Let me—”

Experimentally, he pushed at the substance, the matter, the ether—whatever it was that surrounded them—as though swimming. It seemed to work well enough, propelling him closer to the monster-shaped Ronan-thing; its darting energy, its timidness. Watching it—and he didn’t know how, but he could tell that it was watching him, too—Adam stretched out his hand, palm up, and touched it.

Ronan!

Ronan!

Ronan!

It was him. It was him. It was the thumping bass of his music, hand on the gearshift, midnight rides, midnight mass in an empty church, stained glass, blood on the floorboards. It was the blackened music in his words; it was the subtle blush on his cheeks, around a locker door. It was the warm animal smell of sleeping cows and knocking shoulders, it was wild laughter against the burn of pavement against skin. It was his hands on Adam’s ribs, tangled in Adam’s hair, the sweetness of his kisses when Adam let him set the pace, the savoring kind.

It was him.

Ronan, Ronan, it is you. I did it. I found you. With just a sweetmetal. I found you.

They were thoughts tumbled together, one atop another in his excitement, in his pride, in his unspeakable joy. Thoughts, that was all, but that was all they needed.

Tamquam, said Ronan, and Adam’s heart swelled further.

Alter idem.

If they’d had arms, they would have embraced, but what was that compared to this, gold and dark, wound together. Arms would have only gotten in the way. Words would have only gotten in the way. Adam understood now how inadequate they were, a clumsy attempt at conveying matters that should be left just to feel.

All that was left was clarity.

Second self, I’ve found you.

Adam shared his hurt when Ronan didn’t call, his loneliness at Harvard, his confusion at who he was meant to be now, his anger at all of it, but mostly at himself. Ronan shared his looming doubts, his endless question—who am I what am I who am I—his fear that he might not be human at all, his creeping knowledge that this world, in fact, was not made for him. Adam showed him his heart—his sleepless nights, his searching streets, his twisted-up stomach. Ronan showed him a photo that Adam had never known he’d kept, another of Blue’s—the two of them, Ronan wild with laughter, Adam sly, Ronan’s heart exposing it to Hennessy in a dream, even when he’d meant to keep it for himself. Ronan showed him Hennessy, and Bryde, and all of the things they were, the good and the bad and the impossible, the destruction of server farms and the blissful silence of Virginian hills. Adam showed him the Crying Club and the fourteen dollar waffles, the tarot readings, the smudged phone number on his hand. At once, they were both in a memory: Adam seeing it through Ronan’s eyes, and Ronan through his, the two of them seated in the center of a labyrinth. Ronan watched two tears stain his own face; one black, one clear. Adam watched himself gently wipe each one with his fingers, and show them to Ronan in turn. It was the day the end had begun.

The end. How could Adam have thought it was the end? How could he have let Declan give his brother up to the Moderators, under the auspices of helping him? How could he have left that dreamwatch and walked away, when Ronan was right here, unreachable, watching him do it?

Ronan forgave him; Ronan understood. How could Ronan have run from him, disappeared without a trace, without a phone call? Without reassurance that he was safe, that Adam was still loved, that it wasn’t them but it was Ronan’s impossible, incompatible life that he was grappling with, and that he was afraid if he called Adam, that Adam would only confirm it meant they were impossible too?

Adam forgave him; Adam understood.

Another memory, or perhaps it was a future: they lay side-by-side on the roof of a barn. The stars performed just for them; they were dazzling, dwarfing, all-seeing, all-knowing. They were Adam-and-Ronan, Ronan-and-Adam, and they were comfortable, side-by-side, they were happy. They watched the stars. There was no need for words. The world seemed so big.

There was a ring in Ronan’s pocket.

They wandered the Barns, and they built and they burned. They discovered dreams you could hold, and dreams you could feel. They rambled through Lindenmere, dangerous but not to them, and they had all the time in the world to do it. They drove windblown on winding roads, hair whipping, bass in chest, and they were alive, alive, alive.

To be known like this, to be loved like this, to be wanted like this. It was terrifying and thrilling all at once. It was more than they could bear, it was everything they’d ever wanted. It was new and it was home. It was Adam-and-Ronan, Ronan-and-Adam but it was more than that, impossible, inevitable: one entity, one thing that contained them both. Time was meaningless here, and they were endless.

Until, all at once, they weren’t.

Chapter Text

Adam was alone, in the darkness.

He did not have a body here, so he grounded himself in the memory of having a body instead.

The tangy smell of dirty motor oil, its steady drip-drip-drip into a metal pan. That sideways feeling when he lay on his back and rolled himself under a vehicle, the pursing of lips while identifying a problem, groping blindly for his cold metal tools.

The sound of his mother’s voice calling him in for supper, shrill and harassed, the drawn lines of her mouth as she set a skimpy plate before him. The scrape of his knife, the way his shoulders tensed when it drew his father’s attention.

The stale smell of the backseat of the Camaro, littered with fast food bags and crumpled note paper, the pressure and warmth of Ronan’s leg slung casually across his own. The swoop in his belly he’d felt at the weight of it, and immediately tamped back down: it was all for Declan’s benefit, it was all for show (though later he’d begun to wonder).

The crunch of frosted leaves beneath his shoes. Blowing warm air on frozen fingers. Making smoke with his breath in the morning air.

The itch of a tag between shirt collar and neck, dry eyes under the greenish fluorescent lighting of the courtroom where a judge had ruled in favour of his freedom, and his friends had run all the way there to stand at his side.

The rumble of machinery beneath him as he dug a hole for swimming, the satisfying tug of the earth giving way, the constant lopsidedness of hearing the roar of the engine in one ear and nothing—nothingness—in the other.

The sting of gravel in his palms.

Hot tears.

Wounded pride.

The sound of Ronan’s heartbeat when Adam lay his good ear against his chest.

Ronan, he thought, and then, “Ronan!” he said, because he could no longer feel him, no longer sense his thoughts or his want or his need or all those bigger-than-life feelings he kept on the inside. Inside was outside, here, and Adam no longer had any questions about Ronan’s feelings, about his own, about the two of them and all that they were meant to be for each other.

But Ronan was gone—a vision of fire, an apocalypse, a bomb, and Matthew—Adam had felt Ronan’s horror, he’d tasted it—a hoarse, voice-breaking scream, ripped from his own throat as they’d been wrenched apart—and Adam was adrift.

I’ll go back to my body for now, he told himself firmly, fighting the panic that threatened to overwhelm. I found him once, I can do it again.

But try as he might, he could not find the thread that should have served as his tether. He visualized the faded mural, in that damp corridor, Ronan’s body slumped on the floor. He saw himself, seated among symbols and spellwork, eyes open but vacant, glassed.

Nobody home.

He looked at the boy, sitting on the floor, and as he did, he couldn’t seem to recall his name. But he was sure that he knew him.

The magician, he thought. That seemed right.

He looked at the other boy, sleeping. Greywaren. The boy’s chest rose and fell, rose and fell.

Ronan.

And it came back to him then, with a rush of recognition and relief, because they were one: Ronan-and-Adam, Adam-and-Ronan, second self, tamquam alter idem.

My name is Adam Parrish. I know who I am.

For the first time in a long time, he felt this was true.

Adam’s body wouldn’t have him, so he returned to his memories instead.

*

Their relationship had not had a particularly happy beginning.

This was no fault of their own, really. It was timing, and circumstance. Ronan, mourning the gruesome, final death of his mother, the stuff of nightmares. Dangerous for a dreamer to dwell on. Adam, reminded of what had been taken from him, his powerlessness, each time he saw the bruises his own fingers had pressed into Ronan’s throat, each time he winced at the rawness from the ribbon on his wrists. Both of them grappling with the memory of those impossibly long minutes when they had failed their king, when Gansey was dead, and the unknown implications of Cabeswater’s sacrifice for him. The unmistakable power that now hummed beneath their friend’s skin, the something other he’d become in the process. None of them keen to investigate it.

Ronan did not go back to Aglionby. Adam, of course, did. The hallowed halls were a little less interesting without his lightning smirk or his boots stomping through the halls, Latin class a lot more dull. Adam made notes in the margins of his notebooks, things to remember to share with him later. There was still Gansey, of course, and Adam would never not be grateful for him. Gansey never spoke of what those moments had been like for him—to be unmade, and made again—but Adam could not fail to notice that those ever-ready Aglionby-isms, those disarming smiles, those Dick Gansey the Third charms—they were a little less swift to appear than they used to be.

There was Henry now, too, who was not always around but sometimes fell into step with them as though he’d always been there. Adam grudgingly supposed he had earned the right. Ronan still snorted in derision whenever Henry’s name was mentioned, but usually managed not to be outwardly aggressive whenever they were all in the same place, to his credit. Or to the credit of Blue’s admonishing boot.

Pizza at Nino’s was still a regular affair.

“Fifth wheelin’ it once again I see, love that for me,” said Henry, squeezing in beside Blue and Gansey, beckoning one finger obnoxiously at the waitress. Ronan feigned aggressive disinterest in this comment, immersed in the menu, stretching out his other arm to rest on the booth behind Adam.

Blue, after an altruistic glare at Henry on the waitress’ behalf, surveyed them across the booth, arms crossed.

“The fuck’s your problem?” Ronan said, tossing the menu on the table with his other hand.

“I’ve got no problem,” Blue said, matter-of-factly. “I happen to think you two jackasses deserve each other.” This was said with fondness. “I’m just still trying to figure out exactly how this—” she gesticulated in their general direction “—came to be, since neither of you care to illuminate that for the class!”

Adam shifted in his seat, while Ronan remained perfectly still.

“Sounds tough for you,” said Ronan. Then he cracked a smile. “Sorry not sorry I stole your boyfriend, bro.”

Gansey barked out a laugh at this, and the table dissolved into giggles.

“Yeah, well,” Blue said, attempting a straight face, though her mouth was twitching. “Enjoy your sloppy seconds, bitch.”

Adam huffed a laugh, but felt his cheeks growing hot, despite himself. He felt the gentle trace of a calloused thumb at the nape of his neck, and then Ronan removed his arm from the back of the booth and set about rolling up straw wrappers into spitballs, which Blue confiscated as quickly as they were made.

He was happy, in moments like this, Adam decided. He thought that Ronan was, too. They were here, they were alive, they were together. They were eating pizza at Nino’s on a Friday night, like every other teenager in Henrietta. Yet they were utterly unlike every other teenager in Henrietta, in that they had oh so recently tangled with demons, and lived to tell the tale.

What comes after that? The happily ever after, or so he’d been told.

Under the table, Adam pressed his leg into Ronan’s. Ronan’s face changed imperceptibly, the tiniest crook at the corner of his mouth. He pressed back.

The happily ever after. Adam’s had been shaped one way in his mind for so long, but this? This part was unexpected. This wasn’t part of the plan.

Ronan’s thigh was warm against his. Later they might take a drive, hug the curves of the mountain roads, gaze at the stars, gaze at each other, initiate a tentative, and then not-so-tentative kiss.

This wasn’t part of the plan, but that didn’t make Adam want it any less.

*

Adam’s hand—the ghost of a hand—reached out, grasping. He’d felt the thread of something, within the swirling dark, something that had form and texture and slipped through his fingers, tickling. Whatever it was, it withdrew from his touch. Adam licked his lips, concentrated on the dryness of his tongue. Anything to ground him in the semblance of a form he’d constructed for himself here.

“Ronan?” Adam’s voice, if it really was his voice, was cracked and scared, like a child’s.

*

“What’s yours like?”

They were sprawled atop the blankets in Ronan’s childhood bedroom, rumpled and comfortable, a little bit flushed, a little bit undressed. Adam absent-mindedly spun one of the wheels of the little musical car Niall Lynch had once dreamed for his son, just a plaything, one simple dream in a house full of complicated ones. It held a happy memory for him now, a first kiss, then a second, like the first true breath he’d ever taken, tangled up in summer rain.

“My what?”

Ronan gestured around, lazily.

“You’ve been in my room,” said Adam, then, with a smirk, “Don’t you remember?”

“Jesus fuck, do I,” said Ronan. “I’m not talking about your room at St. Agnes, dipshit.”

“You mean,” said Adam. The wheel stopped spinning, and his voice sounded harsh in the sudden silence. “At the trailer park?”

Ronan shrugged.

“You’ve seen that place,” Adam said. “Why would you wanna know that?”

“I dunno,” said Ronan. “You’ve been all over my childhood, inside and out. What was little Adam into? Collecting stamps? Homework? Jesus, you probably spent your time colour-coding your sock drawer, didn’t you?”

Adam did not smile. He shifted away; lay on his back, stared at the ceiling.

“I didn’t have a childhood, Lynch.”

Ronan was silent for a moment, then lay down beside him. He stayed silent a little while longer.

“I mean,” Adam relented. “I didn’t have a childhood that I want to reminisce about.”

Ronan stretched his hands above his head, resting his skull in his palms. They lay like that, quietly, for a few minutes more. Adam knew he didn’t have to say anything else; Ronan wouldn’t ask him to.

He sat up.

“The walls were made of that vinyl panelling shit, that you could put a fist through without even trying” he said, tucking his knees up under his chin. “It was nothing like this. I wasn’t allowed to use thumbtacks, to put up posters or pictures or anything of mine… it could have been anybody’s bedroom. The carpet was this shitty orange colour…”

He set the little car down between them, gave it a push.

“I used to play with my model car on it. A Pontiac. I could never get it going fast enough.” And here came the memory, the one he’d learned was worse if he tried to push it away: his father and his mother, arguing over his very existence through the cheap vinyl walls.

I regret the minute I squirted him into you

Adam pressed his face into his knees.

“So little Adam was into cars,” said Ronan.

“Yeah,” said Adam, into his knees. Then, after a moment, “I liked motorcycles, too. Always wanted to try riding one. See how far it could take me.”

Ronan was silent for a little while longer. Then Adam felt the bed shift beneath him, and a cool finger began to trace along his back. The pattern was sporadic, but gentle, the touch soothing, and Adam allowed his shoulders to relax.

“Whacha doin’?” he asked, his voice muffled.

“Counting freckles,” said Ronan, quietly, behind him.

“Gonna take a while,” said Adam.

Ronan’s touch did not falter.

“I’ve got time,” he said.

Adam, overwhelmed, kept his face in his knees.

*

In the dark, something answered him, but it wasn’t Ronan.

“Adam Parrish…” it hissed, and then with scorn, “Magician. Little human, you are all alone.”

He knew the voice, it had echoed in his mind for months. He knew the feel of it, oily and glutinous and suffocating. He knew its face, although it didn’t really have one.

He swallowed. He could still swallow. “You’re the Lace,” he said. He could still speak.

“So you call me,” the creature said. It spoke from within Adam’s head; not without. It caressed his ears. Its touch was repulsive. “How very small you think. How very small you are.”

Adam closed his eyes. He could still close his eyes.

*

Adam extricated himself from the underbelly of the Hondayota and wiped his brow, reaching for his water bottle. A shadow fell upon him, and he found himself face to upside-down face with a little girl, dirt on her cheek, solemn-eyed.

“Hi, Opal,” he said, sitting up and taking a swig. It was fucking hot today, spring melting into something summerlike, but it wasn’t properly summer yet. Ronan was around, somewhere, working in the fields. Adam liked this. He could be here, at the Barns, but he was not a visitor anymore, or a guest, someone Ronan had to entertain. He could come and go as he pleased. The word for it, the right word, teased him, but he wasn’t brave enough to say it out loud yet.

Home.

Opal waited until he was done drinking, and then grabbed hold of his wrist to swing it back and forth. Her hooves slipped on a stray stone; she wasn’t wearing her boots today.

Opal was not a child, not exactly. She did not need minding most of the time, although she was liable to tear apart the kitchen looking for recycling to eat if left unsupervised. Adam was grateful for her self-sufficiency; he was not prepared to take on surrogate parenthood when he had not yet graduated high school, and Ronan sure as fuck wasn’t either. But sometimes, like now, she was still very much like a child, and it was easy to forget that she was really just Ronan, a manifestation of his soul, or his psyche, at the very least.

Adam was exasperatingly fond of her.

She had chosen her name for herself, after overhearing Adam tell Ronan, “We can’t just keep calling her Orphan Girl,” which Ronan would have been content to go on doing indefinitely. She’d first found it in a dusty book of Celtic legends, and after Adam had shown her some pictures of what the namesake gemstone looked like, her mind had been set.

“Ronan is mad today,” she said now, continuing to swing Adam’s wrist. The beautiful dreamwatch Ronan had given him at Christmas—his boyfriend was impossibly romantic at the most unexpected of times, and the memory of it still knocked Adam off-kilter when he dwelled on it too long—glinted in the sun, and she eyed it with the look of someone in mind of a snack.

“And he’ll be even madder if you eat this watch,” he said, gently shaking free of her and turning to pack up his toolbox.

“He kicked the door to the tractor barn in,” she continued, turning her attention to Adam’s tools, which were also off-limits. “Clear off the hinges! And then he cursed up a storm because now he has to fix that, too.”

Adam sat back against the car. “Well,” he drawled, taking another swig of water. “Sounds about how I’m feeling about this shitbox right now.”

“He’s acting mad,” Opal said. “But I don’t think he really is. I think he’s sad.”

Adam set his water bottle down.

“Yeah,” he said. “I reckon he is. He’s got a lot to be sad about.”

“Why do people do that?” asked Opal. “Act mad when they’re really just sad?”

Adam thought, before he spoke.

“Feelings don’t really work the way they teach us in school,” he said, finally. “They don’t fit into boxes. Happy, sad, angry, excited. Right now Ronan might be feeling sad, he might be grieving. He might be frustrated about the repairs, or that rain he’s been trying to dream up for the forest. He might be angry, at—” his father, his brother, his lot in life, at Adam for preparing to leave for college in the fall, even if he would never say it. “Who knows? But Ronan could be feeling all of those things at once, even though anger is the one that’s showing the most right now.” Adam looked off in the direction of the barns. “And sometimes all those feelings… they amplify each other, you know?”

Opal sat next to him, against the car, and took his wrist in her little hands again. “He feels happy the most when you’re here, I think.”

Adam sat quietly for a little while longer, then he stood.

“I think I’ll go find him,” he said.

She darted close enough to hug him round the knees, and then skipped off into the grass.

*

“I’m not listening to you,” Adam said. He kept his eyes closed.

The Lace’s touch traced his ears, along the line of his jaw. It tipped up his chin. Adam hated it, but he used it, used it to remember the shape of himself, to hold himself there. Ronan would find him. Ronan was made of the same stuff as this place, he could navigate it better than Adam could. Adam just had to hold himself together long enough.

“I’m trying to understand,” the Lace said, and its silky, tattered form oozed fascination and jealousy in equal measures. “What he sees in you. How he could possibly have gotten so attached. Why he would ever choose… you.”

Adam opened his eyes now, and stared directly at it.

*

Adam’s touch was growing bolder; they were still learning all the ways they could love like this. There was a flush to Ronan’s chest, and Adam was the one who put it there. He was ridiculously pleased. Ronan was a god, and he wanted this. He wanted Adam.

Adam had known, for a long time, that he was just as attracted to men as he was to women. It was the models on magazine covers, maybe, or the clean-cut lawyers and detectives on TV… it was the way his body reacted when Boyd’s handsome twenty-something nephew came to help out in the shop and leaned a little too close over a smoking engine, certainly. Or the thrill he’d first felt when he’d become aware of Ronan’s interest.

It was the more difficult of the options, for sure, and so Adam had never really pursued this attraction outside of the safety of his own thoughts. There were enough girls around the trailer park who found his brand of politeness, combined with quiet cynicism, appealing. Better not to give his father more fuel for the fire.

Ronan, though… the long lines of his body, the simmer in his eyes. That goddamn tattoo. Ronan made every sensible, pragmatic part of him catch fire. More every day.

He wanted him. He wanted this.

“Lynch,” said Adam.

Ronan dragged his gaze up to Adam’s, pupils blown, looking utterly wrecked. It was the hottest fucking thing he’d ever seen.

Ronan’s lips were parted, they were moving. “Please.” It was a prayer, and only for him.

Adam answered it.

*

“You are too bold, human,” the Lace said. It moved out of his view, and Adam took heart. It did not like him looking at it any more than he liked it looking at him.

But then it turned, and Adam felt the full weight of its scorn. It cut through the memories he’d been weaving, into the sinew holding his intention-built muscle and flesh together, and he knew then that in allowing him to do so, the Lace had just been playing with him. He felt the pieces of himself splinter apart, and begin to bob and float into darkness.

Fear overtook him.

Ronan! he called, but his voice was no longer his own.

The Lace plucked a piece of him up, and Adam could feel its corruption, black seeping into gold. The Lace was pawing through his memories like a table at a rummage sale.

The memories assault him in glimpses.

A car full of Aglionby boys speeds by, a showy orange Camaro, one of them hanging out the window. He’s walking his bike up the last of the hill, eyes on the pavement, but he looks up now. The boy is looking back at him, craning his neck as the muscle car roars up the hill.

Shame, deep-spun and woven through him, creeps up to flush his neck.

He’s pushing a battered model car along the carpet in his bedroom. He can hear his parents fighting through the wall; their words are indistinct, except when they raise their voices.

It’s the first time he’s been invited to Monmouth Manufacturing; Gansey’s eyes are welcoming, interested, but Ronan Lynch, in the corner, is bristling and sharp. He glances down at Adam’s hands, and Adam knows they are stained with grease. He resists the urge to curl them, to hide the truth of where he came from, of what he really was, and holds his head high in defiance instead.

There was nowhere to hide in Henrietta. That was why he had to get out.

A dented cardboard box, its contents scattered across the room and Blue, grown three sizes with calm, righteous anger. Adam’s greatest fear come to life, and he didn’t even know how it had happened. Adam, become his father, except that Blue would not allow it.

Fingernails dug at Adam’s face; they were his own. Please, he thought, but no other words came.

He still had fingernails. He still had a face. The Lace did not, but it smiled at him all the same.

Its smile was more terrible than it had ever been before.

That awful feeling, that sour-tasting pride, that wordless rage. One foot in front of the other, while Gansey kept pace with him in the Camaro.

That horror-filled disorientation, coming back to himself at the side of a highway in Washington. Not knowing where he’d gone while his body had marched on without him.

That ringing in his ear, blood on his fingers. Too dizzy to stand, too weak to protest. He was used to blows. None had ever felt like this. Ronan, bundled into the back of a police car.

So much shame, the Lace observed. Your life is saturated with it.

So many lies he’d told.

I don't want it to be.

Ronan sullen and silent, Adam goading him into unwilling speech. Words to cut, the way only Ronan could. Adam, questioning everything, every gift of himself he’d ever given. Walking out the door, intent on walking back to Henrietta. Not their first fight, or their last, but one of their worst.

But Ronan didn’t let me walk away that night. We were better, together, because of that night. You’re only telling half the story.

Adam hung onto that thought, tangible and bulbous as it was, wrapped his approximated arms around it, because it was a protest. It was a revolt. He was a collection of scattered consciousness, but he was still a consciousness. He existed. He was Adam Parrish.

I know who I am. He knows who I am. And I am not ashamed. Not anymore.

But you should be, the Lace said. You are only human. He is not for you.

The endless nights and days and nights again, pick up the phone, check for messages, put down the phone, do it again. The endless cycle of eat-class-eat-class-eat-cards-study, soundtrack on repeat, the life of a Harvard student, void of anything that might make it worthwhile. The endless queasy feeling in his stomach, not knowing, not knowing, not knowing.

And where is he now? the Lace said into his ear, deaf or not, it didn’t matter. He has left you again, little one. He’s gone, he’s awake, and he has left you here with no one but me.

“No,” said Adam, out loud, and inside he said, he’s awake! Adam had form again; he could speak. He remembered what it felt like, being one, being known. He could still feel the thoroughness of it, the inside out and upside down and around and through and with and surrounding and completeness of it. He knew Ronan as well as he knew himself, and Ronan would not leave him to this fate unless the fate of the whole world rested upon him doing so.

“He’s going to find me again.”

The Lace hissed at this, and started to dig. It dug its shifting claws through Adam’s life and self and memories, turning over stones, shame and embarrassment and pride and fear and casual cruelty and self-disgust. It found them all: moments frozen in time that Adam had blissfully forgotten, others he’d dwelled on for years. The Lace took them out and examined them with the curiosity of a scientist, with the rage of a jilted lover. It was unbearable, to be dissected this way, but Adam bore it, wrapping himself in the feeling of Ronan, all that he was and all that he felt, Ronan’s joy at their reunion and Ronan’s unconditional love. Adam clothed himself in the knowledge that he could be all of these awful, human things and yet he could still be loved, could still be known, could still be understood, and wanted. The Lace kept digging until, for all his armour, Adam was raw and exposed, a little naked thing on a rock, waiting to be devoured.

It dug so far down that it found something new.

There was no longer one Adam Parrish; there were many.

The Adam that was interlaced with the creature called the Lace watched himself walk down an endless hallway, lined with endless doorways, which bore endless identical plaques. One of them was his. Suits stumbled to keep pace with him; he was the one they looked to for guidance. Someone important shook his hand, outside sat a flashy car. Deals were made; lives were ruined; fortunes found. This was the plan; this was the dream: everything he’d ever wanted, when he’d lived in that trailer park.

Over here, another Adam, glassy-eyed on a couch that looked a lot like the one in their living room growing up. No books or papers around him, just fast-food wrappers, as colours from the TV skidded across his face, his phone blinking with dozens of unanswered texts.

The walls were made of vinyl panelling.

There were more. Adam, a lawyer, mounting a coolly logical but passionate defense of a client. Adam, a mechanic with his own small-town shop, taking younger Adams under his wing. Adam, an engineer, developing solutions to problems with paper and pencil. A social worker, an activist, a mysterious government agent. If Adam had hands he would have pressed them to his eyes.

Too many choices. Too many ways to choose wrong.

But then, it wasn’t just Adam, after all. It was Ronan, singing into a ladle in the kitchen at the Barns, burning the chili while they made out against the counter. Ronan, laughing in the rain, cursing at a smoking tractor, gently rubbing a ruddy cow between the eyes. Ronan, cheeks puffed, playing the bagpipes while Matthew laughed. Ronan, looking at Adam slyly or tenderly or pensively in hotel rooms all over the country. Ronan, holding out a ring under the stars, Ronan, dressed all in black, shaded by Lindenmere’s branches.

Ronan, the farmer, loading up the truck for weekly trips to the local market. Ronan, the Declan, code-word phone calls and unsavory business to be handled. Ronan, the lonely dreamer, unable to fit into a human world, retreating to the safety of his bed. Ronan, the healer, walking the ley lines in search of dreamers who might need a teacher like him.

A baby on his hip, an impossible one, with Adam’s freckles and Ronan’s eyes.

A kid, who looked nothing like them at all, initial sullenness giving way to tentative giggles, giving way to full throated joy. Another. Another.

Terrible fights and blissful mornings, taxes and groceries and dreamed up solutions to everyday problems. Tarot cards on a stormy evening. Days when Ronan would get awfully quiet and moments when Adam would gently press his fists into a solid surface, eyes closed, breathing in, breathing out. Afternoons in Lindenmere, to help them remember what it was like to be teenaged and wondering. Road trips and ice cream reunions, pizza and drive-ins and mountain roads. Tangled limbs and steady heartbeats, starry nights and pristine winter dawns. Nieces and honourary nephews and growing families and changing priorities and lines around Ronan’s eyes, ink on Adam’s skin.

Adam understood, with perfect clarity: these were not memories, but they could be. For a creature like the Lace, in a place like this, linear time was most likely just an inconvenience. But for Adam, the choices that could lead to this future or that—some contradictory, some complimentary—these choices were yet to be made. He could still make them, if he got the chance.

The plan he’d outlined for himself so long ago had only taken into account half a life, with room for work and money and power and none at all carved out for joy, or magic, or love. The plan assumed that Adam would want the same things at 19 and 25 and 42 and 67 that he had wanted as a broken, hungry child. Acknowledging that he didn’t, that the things he wanted and loved and valued and dreamed of had changed—it didn’t mean that he had somehow failed.

That was just growing up. That was just… life.

If Adam continued to enslave himself to the life a scared, brave child had once dreamed up as the only way he could see to escape his father, to prove his worth, to make his life into something worth living... then he’d never really left the trailer park, had he? Adam knew who he was. He knew his worth.

The door was open. He’d already escaped. Why was he staying in the safety of the cell?

Fuck the plan.

For the first time, here in this place where ideas and wants and needs could be held in the palm of a hand, Adam looked at the pathways before him and thought, this isn’t too many choices.

This is freedom.

The Lace shrieked, wordless rage and indignation, and something changed.

The more he reached for them, those golden glimpses of the happy-sad-angry-wonderful ever after they could build, whatever they might choose to do with it—he and his second self—the farther from him they seemed to get. Blackness seeped into the cracks, blotting out the shine in Ronan’s eyes, the timbre of his wild laughter. The Lace was laughing at him now, and the sound of it was poisonous.

No

Everything blurred; grew distant and muffled.

Not now

When Adam moved, his legs did not follow.

Not when I finally understand

His shoulders drifted, his belly rolled, his knees collapsed beneath him. He was merely a collection of feelings and thoughts, and they were dissipating in different directions.

I’m coming apart

I’m apart

I’m

.

.

.

.

.

For how long did he drift? He would never know. He became aware of Ronan’s voice, more real than any dream. He would recognize it, always.

“Adam,” Ronan said, and then Ronan was there before him, just out of reach, a human boy with a handsome face, painted in tears, a breaking voice, a breaking heart. So much more.

“Adam, I’m so sorry.”

Chapter Text

Adam Parrish was a galaxy made up of human things, thoughts and feelings, memories. He was colliding, imploding, a roiling ocean of wants and needs and hopes and dreams, just a drop of water, a shooting star, a solitary atom. He had enough awareness of his surroundings and his fractured self to know that he still had a sense of self. And yet—he was a mess of human things, but he wasn’t properly a human.

The man that Adam Parrish loved stood before him in this impossible place, the sweetmetal sea. Tears in his eyes, heart in his hands. He was human-shaped, but that was misleading.

And anyway, that wasn’t what mattered to Adam.

“Ronan,” said Adam, willing speech into existence. Manifesting himself a mouth to speak, lips, tongue, teeth, throat. Ronan, though he looked once more the way Adam had always known him to look—fierce eyes and fierce face—he was brimming with energy, alien and strange, human and familiar, and Adam drew upon it, pulling himself into something resembling the body he had left behind.

For a moment, Ronan could not look at him, and then Ronan could not look away. They stared at each other, into each other, for an eternal, microscopic moment of existence. In his hands, Ronan held a flame. A spark, really, but Adam could feel what it really was, the intention of it, the potential of it. It whispered to him, incessant, single-minded.

Devour, devour

Adam willed himself hands, so he could take Ronan’s in his own. The hungry flame tickled heat between their fingers, but it did not burn. Here, in this place, they were one, sharing all of themselves. Adam felt Ronan’s unspeakable joy at seeing him again, when he’d feared Adam already lost. He tasted Ronan’s anguish at the cruelty of the joke, this wonderful-awful gift the Lace had given him.

And Adam understood.

He saw the moments that led up to this one: Ronan waking at last to the buzz of a tattoo gun, sweetmetal ink in his arm. A scaffolded building, the lobby within, Adam’s own body limp on the stairs. The stranger, gathering together a journal; a bomb, an ending for all, something awful and sinister, pure destruction, hate. He saw Ronan holding the strange dreamer at bay, chasing him through their dreams. He saw Bryde, granting them the gift of time, these few precious moments they had together now. He saw what Ronan was preparing to do.

The Lace laughed in Adam’s deaf ear. It was still wound around him, throughout him, timely to untangle, and Bryde’s gift, though generous, was running out.

Time was the one power Ronan didn’t have.

Make your choice, Greywaren.

Adam understood what Ronan needed him to do, even if Ronan himself did not.

He took all the memories, all the moments he’d glimpsed, stolen from their possible futures. He lay them bare for Ronan to see, and then tucked them in close to his heart. He would build himself a fortress out of them, a place that the Lace couldn’t understand and therefore couldn’t tarnish, when it took him at last for its own. No longer hopes—something to work toward, something to draw strength from, something to build—just a beautiful collection of dreams.

A strangled sound left Ronan’s throat. “Parrish,” he said, in that human, broken voice. He was pleading: don’t make me choose; begging for absolution, for this burden to be taken from him, for respite from the constant pain. His grief was a swollen, heavy thing, deep in his belly, for his mother, his father, for his beloved brother Matthew; for all those quiet mornings and high-speed nights they would never get to have, for the children, dreamt or otherwise, who would never fill the Barns with laughter. For Ronan-and-Adam, Adam-and-Ronan, and everything they were supposed to have become.

Adam was the monster now, intertwined with the Lace, already twisting into something misshapen, something wrong. He felt it creeping up his neck, probing at his thoughts, and Adam turned them into iron, on the strength of Ronan’s gaze. You can’t have me yet.

Adam could not give Ronan what he wanted, but he would give him what he could.

“Lynch,” he said. “There’s no point in choosing me if there won’t be a world left for us to live in.’

Adam’s hands, now, were flickering in and out of existence, but he urged the ghost of them upward, gently cupping Ronan’s face between them. Ronan didn’t look away.

They were already one, and there was no need to say it here, but he did anyway. “Tamquam.”

At this, Ronan swallowed. “Alter idem.”

Time. They would never have enough of it, so Adam picked up all the disparate things he was feeling and pushed them at him: fear, love, understanding, forgiveness. Fierce pride in Ronan and this terrible, horrible, selfless choice he was making. A desperate wish for him to somehow be able to live with it, to go on and be, to honour what they’d had by loving himself the way Adam had loved him.

An odd sense of calm, or peace, as though Adam, so long from his body, had already detached himself from the life they might have had, the life he had only just known for sure that he wanted.

Profound sadness at the loss of it. Anger, yes, anger. Disbelief that it was ending this way. Gratitude for everything they’d gotten.

Nobility, in sacrifice.

He was feeling a thousand things, and Ronan was feeling a thousand more. It was too much, too much, and Adam began to tumble into pieces. Soon there was not enough of him left for Ronan to hold. The Lace chortled in delight.

The flame in Ronan’s hands sang its endless, hungry song.

Devour, devour

A sob tore from Ronan's throat. With one last look at the fragments that used to be Adam Parrish, he wrenched himself away, and darted off into the ether.

Good, thought Adam, or what was left of him. That’s good.

He wanted the world to be saved.

The Lace circled its prey, and he shuddered from the weight of it. It would not make this quick. It wanted to learn from him, some knowledge he had that it deemed too audacious for him to know. It wanted to bathe in Adam’s despair, but this time it could not find his shame. It writhed within him, without him, pulling the fibers of Adam Parrish into gossamer, thinner and thinner, but Adam was safe within the walls of his past-present-future, and it had not taken that from him yet.

It was only when he saw a glow of bluish, blazing light, that he realized something else had pierced the darkness. Someone else was here.

“Begone, bitch. I’ve got work to do.”

A girl, a woman, dark-skinned and luminous, searing sword in hand. The sweetmetal sea parted for her, and she swung it now in a circle, overhead, driving the Lace back. Adam felt intense relief wash over him as it withdrew, unlacing itself from the tendrils of what was left of his mind.

He knew her name was Hennessy, because he had suffered her cutting remarks, straight to the bone. He had sat side-by-side with her in companionable misery, he had held her, despite her protests, when she cried. Had been rescued by her already, in a dream.

Or rather, Ronan had.

“So,” The Lace was not gone, but she had all of its attention. It needled at her, prodding, poking, but Hennessy paid it no mind. Adam suspected this skill was not flippancy, but hard-won determination instead. She put her hands on her hips, surveying him. She had to look in many different places to do so. “You must be the infamous Adam.”

Adam floated and bobbed, because that was all he could muster.

“I must say, mate, you’re looking rather… what’s the word? Frazzled. Fractured. Discombobulated. At any rate, this can’t be fun for you,” she said. “Really, it’s probably no less than you deserve, picking yourself a big damn hero for a boyfriend. Oh, but you understand. Go on, baby. No point in saving little old me if there’s no world for me to live in!”

She didn’t stop talking, but all the while she was poking and prodding at Adam’s existence, countless golden bubbles, slowly herding them back together. “So fucking logical, in the face of certain death. Couldn’t be me. I’d kill that boy’s ass if he left me in this place.”

Hennessy smoothed cool fingers across the crown of his head—Adam was surprised to find he had a head—as though she was shaping him from clay. He was beginning to feel a little more substantial. “Bitch, can you even die here? Or do you just go on and on in pieces forever?”

Adam did not know. He did not much like the thought.

“Anyway,” Hennessy continued, seemingly unbothered by his unresponsiveness, seemingly unbothered by the Lace, which continued to hiss its displeasure. “Lynch is going to be a absolute bear to be around—and not in the fun gay way—if he actually manages to save the world out there and you’re not it. He’ll bury himself in guilt, you know he’ll be seasonally depressed as fuck. Or waste his life away trying to get you back. I’m not dealing with that.”

Adam wiggled his fingers. He wiggled his toes. It felt wonderful. Hennessy pushed one last golden bubble straight into his chest. Something warm washed over him.

“Christ on a bike, I hope I’ve got all of you,” she muttered.

The warmth turned to heat, turned to blistering. Hennessy stood back to survey her handiwork. “Ready or not, magician, our time is up,” she said, flashing him a peace sign. “Catch you on the flip side. I hope.”

And then she disappeared.

Adam looked at his hands: intact, calloused, rings of black grease beneath his fingernails. He felt his way down his torso, kicked out his legs to look at his worn leather sneakers. He was a little bit hungry. He was definitely thirsty. He was still in the sweetmetal sea, but he had a body, and it was far more than the one he’d managed for himself in this place. The Lace would have trouble pulling this one apart.

The Lace, bereft now of Hennessy, looked to Adam again. Adam looked back, and it seemed to shrink at his gaze. The sweetmetal sea was quiet now, but it pulsed, shifted, as though it were breathing. As though it were alive.

“Hennessy?” Adam ventured. And then,

“Ronan?”

And that’s when Adam woke up.

He woke up slowly, groggily, as one does when dragged from sleep at ass o’clock in the morning by the insistent buzzing of an alarm clock, but he was not in bed, nothing so cozy as that. The first sensation Adam registered was cement, cold and damp beneath him. The second was the dryness of his mouth, the insistent cramping of his stomach. The third was the hands that were shaking him.

“Ronan,” he gasped, his throat raw and parched, but it was his, and the physicality of the sensations nearly overwhelmed him: the soreness, the dampness, the pain, the cold. He pulled himself into a sitting position, regretting the movement immediately as shockwaves of dizziness ricocheted through his body. He reached up to grab the wrists of the person shaking him.

People, two of them, twin-faced. Jordan Hennessy, and Jordan Hennessy.

“Easy, tiger,” said one of them.

Adam gripped their wrists, twin pulses beneath his fingers, anchoring himself to this moment, this place, this body. Cold pavement beneath him, the smell of smoke, blinding sunshine… city traffic and a streetscape of scaffolds and plastic sheeting, all of it discordant, all of it beautiful, all of it fragile.

He was awake. He was alive.

A rasp, a growl, deep within his chest. “Where’s Ronan?”

One of the Jordan Hennessys glanced in the direction of the scaffolded facade. Smoke, pouring from the windows, and flames, licking, licking, licking—

Devour, devour

Adam launched himself upward, staggering at the suddenness. His body continued to protest strongly against being upright. He wondered how long it had been empty, how long it had been vulnerable, how long it had been violated. How long it had been since it was his own.

It did not feel wholly his yet.

“For fuck’s sake, not again,” said one of them. “The pair of you, really.”

Adam struggled to recapture his balance, swaying on his feet, his eyes searching what he could see of the building. His body was his, he would reclaim it, but it had been altered in his absence, starved, atrophied, drained of essence. He felt like a newborn thing, naked and weak.

“You can’t help him if you kill yourself trying to get to him, bruv,” said one of them, and he thought it was Hennessy, maybe, who took him by the arm, keeping him from falling. He sagged onto her gratefully. “Anyway, we’ve got to wait for—”

She gestured at the facade. The flames there seemed to be abating.

A moan from the sidewalk, and the other Jordan Hennessy rushed to the side of a woman who lay there, crumpled, covered in blood. Adam hadn’t noticed her before, but he recognized her now. He’d seen her wielding a sword, the same one Hennessy had conjured to drive the Lace away from him, another one, already dreamt into the world. The Moderator. He searched Ronan’s memories. She did not seem to be the enemy now.

“Hennessy,” Jordan said. “She’s not in good shape here. I’ve got to get her some help.”

“Do it,” said Hennessy. “We’ll find Sir Dreams-a-lot and then we’re all getting the hell out of here.”

Before she had even finished speaking, Jordan had thrown herself into the street. Tires squealed.

“Fuck. Shit,” said Adam, grabbing hold of the rail of the building’s steps. “Is she—”

“She’s fine,” Hennessy said brusquely, glancing over her shoulder as she started steering him up the stairs. “Are you fine? I mean, do you think you’re all there, if you know what I’m saying? All the bits and bobs that make Adam Parrish Adam Parrish?”

Adam, intent upon their destination, and the person he both hoped and feared to find there, attempted an inventory: he remembered the Lace, he remembered the sweetmetal sea. He remembered everything he had seen there, everything he and Ronan had become there, what came before. Memories intact, so far as he could tell.

His head was clear; his analytical capability seemingly unharmed, despite the fact that he was currently being frog-marched willingly into a burning building.

For Ronan, of course. Only for Ronan. Feelings presented and accounted for.

“I reckon so,” he said, carefully. And then, “Thank you.”

Hennessy’s wry mouth twisted into something resembling a genuine smile.

They pushed open the door, and found no fire.

The building itself seemed unharmed. An opulent lobby greeted them, that art-deco style Boston was so fond of—the one Adam had already seen, through Ronan’s eyes. Some kind of club or hotel, closed for renovations. There was no heat or flame or smoke now—only scattered furniture, and ash, and two bodies on the floor. One was a corpse.

One was not.

“Ronan!” Adam broke free of Hennessy’s grip and stumbled to his side, falling to his knees. Ronan was here, and whole, and unlike Adam he radiated strength and haleness, by all appearances human, a young man in his prime, humming with the power of something more.

His eyes were open. Adam bent close enough to feel the whisper of breath from his lips.

He was awake. He was alive.

He’d done it.

He’d done it.

Adam took in every curve, every line of his face. He was a miracle. He was a god and a monster and a good, good human man. Adam wanted to memorize him, immortalize him. He wanted to carve him into marble, out of clay. “Greywaren,” he said, softly enough that only Ronan could hear him, and then whispered the words that Ronan had whispered to him, not because he’d heard him do it—at the time his body had been quite vacant—but because he had seen Ronan’s memory of doing it, because Adam had done it himself, in that one perfect-terrible-wonderful moment when they had shared everything together, been everything together once more, the moment they thought would be their last.

“Nunquam solus.”

Ronan did not respond, did not move, but a single tear fell from the corner of his eye.

“Well, shitballs,” said Hennessy, standing above them. She had gone to make sure the other dreamer, the one Ronan had given everything to stop, was really good and dead. It seemed he was. “We need to get him out of here before the pigs show up. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like going down for murder tonight.”

“Where are we, anyway?” said Adam, his eyes still on Ronan.

“The Charlotte Club,” said Hennessy. “Beacon Street.”

“Near the river?”

“A few blocks, maybe?”

“Beacon Street runs to the Esplanade,” Adam said. “We’ll be anonymous enough there.”

“Whatever you say, He-Man,” said Hennessy, watching with some amusement as Adam positioned himself behind Ronan and began to lift him by the shoulders. He was reminded forcibly of helping Declan do this very thing with Ronan’s sleeping body, a million years ago, a darker night, a darker time. His body protested—he did not have the strength—but his mind overruled.

They heard a siren in the distance.

“All right, all right,” Hennessy said, picking up his feet, and together they managed to stagger back to the street, with Ronan’s paralyzed form bumping between them. Jordan rejoined them, taking most of the load from Adam, who was beginning to think he might not make it to the river after all. Sweat had broken out on his brow, and the corners of his vision had begun to swim.

“Come on, fuckface, move,” muttered Hennessy, who had turned herself around to carry Ronan’s feet on either side of her hips, as though his body was a self-contained gurney.

This had been addressed to Ronan, who was presumably aware of everything that was happening as he waited to return to the body they were gracelessly locomoting on his behalf. Ronan did not move, but he was awake, and that was more than enough for Adam.

He was awake. He was alive.

They moved as quickly as possible, and for Adam it was on the strength of adrenaline alone. He let the girls take the bulk of the burden; he grit his teeth and put one foot in front of the other, step after step until finally, blessedly, he was stepping on grass. They made it to the shade of the trees, which Adam deemed far enough, and crowded enough, to be safe, and then laid Ronan as gently as they could upon the grass. Adam’s legs gave out, and he tumbled to the ground beside him.

Jordan and Hennessy looked at each other, and then embraced tightly.

Adam sat quietly beside Ronan, and waited.

He allowed his pulse to slow, took this time to catalogue the abuse his body had suffered in service of his mind, the remedies that might be required. He needed water, very soon. He would need to reintroduce himself to food, but slowly, slowly. He needed to sleep for a thousand years. He never wanted to sleep again. He breathed deeply, synchronizing his breath to Ronan’s.

And waited.

There had been many moments like this, since the beginning. Many mornings when Adam stirred only to discover Ronan’s stiff, unmoving body, like a corpse in the bed beside him, a new trinket or bauble or horror held between his hands. It was always unsettling, at first, and then magical, most of all, and Adam, who knew what it was like for your body not to be your own, always waited, quietly, for Ronan to come back to himself, and reach out for him.

And so he did now.

“Adam?”

Ronan sputtered to movement, trying to sit up even before his body was fully willing, scrambling, his voice disbelieving. Adam grinned weakly as Ronan seized him around the neck in a crushing, desperate hug. Now he knew he was here, this was real.

They were awake, they were alive.

They had each other.

They knelt in the grass, clinging to each other, feeling just as much or more than they had felt in the sweetmetal sea, conveying it as best they could when they were not one but two, but always, always, Ronan-and-Adam, Adam-and-Ronan. Ronan’s face was pressed gratefully into Adam’s neck. His arms were strong, his body warm and shaking. Adam was not strong, but he still clung to Ronan with everything he had, felt the familiar shape of him under his hands, pressed into his chest. The shape of home. He looked up at the blue, blue sky, and thought he would never tire of looking at it again.

Ronan, his warm breath nourishment for Adam’s good ear, said in a voice only for him, “Numquam iterum.”

Never alone. Never again.

Adam closed his eyes, and sighed.

Chapter Text

They agreed it would be best to scatter, for now. Jordan and Hennessy made for Jordan’s studio at nearby Fenway while Adam, when he felt steady enough on his feet, led the way to the Isabella Gardner museum and Ronan’s invisible car. They drove out of the city, down the highway—not far, just far enough. Adam sat in the passenger seat with his cheek pressed to the cool glass, watching telephone poles pass and fighting down alternating waves of nausea and dizziness, aware of Ronan’s concern, unable to do anything to reassure him. They drove until they found a box hotel, big enough to be anonymous, run down enough to take payment in cash. Adam, for whom the fresh air of the parking lot had been bracing, paid with the proceeds from his most recent (bullshit) tarot card readings, thankful to find that the apocalyptic dreamer who’d kidnapped his body had been uninterested in rifling through his wallet as well. In return, they were given a key card to a room that was not too nice, but not too bad really, for a kid who grew up in a trailer park and another who’d never lived anyplace that wasn’t already centuries old.

They didn’t have any bags to drop. They stood in the doorway of the unfamiliar, anonymous space, and then Ronan began to explore, opening cupboards, running his hands along polished surfaces and brocade fabric.

Adam went into the bathroom. Everything was the same out-of-date yellowish-beige. There was a built-in hair dryer in the wall, and neatly wrapped miniature soaps lined up along the counter. The light above the sink made his reflection look vaguely greenish, or perhaps that was just his current pallor.

He stood facing the mirror for a very long time.

Eventually, the door opened, and Ronan came in. He looked at Adam, and looked at the Adam in the mirror, and then he unwrapped a glass by the sink from its sanitary packaging and filled it up with water. Adam drank, slowly, gratefully. Ronan refilled the glass, and he drank another, stopping to press its coolness to his forehead.

Ronan turned on the shower. Gently he lifted the jacket from Adam’s shoulders, and Adam obediently raised his arms so Ronan could pull his shirt over his head. When he was undressed, Ronan guided him to the shower—just your everyday tub-and-shower combo—and Adam stepped in, closing his eyes as the water pressed down on him.

He sat down on the floor of the tub.

After a moment, Ronan joined him, his own filthy clothes on the bathroom floor. He wrapped strong legs and arms around Adam from behind, pressing his forehead into the place between Adam’s shoulders. They didn’t really fit all that well, both of them in the tub, but they fit with each other, and for the moment, Adam thought, that seemed more important.

After a while, Adam realized that Ronan was crying, the breath on his neck coming in shudders. Adam reached back to press the palm of his hand firmly against Ronan’s skull.

They stayed like that until the water began to cool. Then they helped one another to stand, and tore open the little novelty packets of soap and shampoo and washed each other’s hair. Adam reveled in the physicality of it, brushing his hands along the short hairs of Ronan’s scalp. He closed his eyes as Ronan’s fingers carefully pulled through his own damp curls, and then he thought that he might cry, too, because it was almost too perfect, it was almost too much.

They washed, and cataloged everything they felt as they did, wordlessly. For now, touch was enough: mapping the shape of each other, once again made human, once again made whole. The hotel towels were fluffy and white and altogether too pristine; they used them anyway, abandoning their hopeless clothing to the bathroom floor and diving under the starched bed covers instead, once they’d loosened them from the iron grip of the mattress. The bed was soft, but impersonal, and Adam found himself shivering. Ronan pulled him closer, and Adam turned to face him, pressing forehead to forehead. They closed their eyes.

When they woke, although they had not meant to sleep, the room was dark; night was upon them. Adam’s mouth was cottony, and it took longer than it ought for him to sort out where they were. Ronan looked similarly bleary.

They had not dreamed.

“I’m really fuckin’ hungry,” said Ronan.

They eyed their creased and crusted clothing on the floor, and sighed.

Dinner for Adam was saltine crackers from the nearest gas station, which he chewed gratefully between sips of water, the familiar red box tucked under his arm like a security blanket. Ronan grabbed a couple of toothbrushes and an armful of prepackaged snacks and had eaten three hot dogs from the warmer before they’d even left the parking lot. They procured a charger for Adam’s phone and managed to find a couple pairs of Red Sox sweatpants and t-shirts in the gas station’s meager souvenir section. When they got back to the hotel they both felt very much as though they needed to shower again before finally chucking their filthy clothes into the hotel trash cans, and collapsing onto the bed in their new, clean ones.

Adam was awake now, and with the crackers in his stomach, was beginning to feel nearly like himself again; like his body was conceding: they could once more be friends. Ronan had spread his selection of gas station snacks around him on the covers; it looked very much like he was planning to eat his way through most of it tonight. Adam felt vaguely ill at the thought.

Few words had passed between them, since they’d bid Hennessy and Jordan goodbye at the Esplanade, but they hadn’t needed them. Ronan had known what Adam had needed, because Ronan Lynch knew Adam Parrish better than any other person in the world. Adam took this thought and turned it over in his head: to be so very known, when he had once thought himself unknowable. He was not afraid of it; he did not feel vulnerable, or frightened, or at risk.

He thought that in fact, he felt all the more stronger for it.

Ronan sat beside him now, this unfathomable boyfriend of his, creature of the ether, born from other planes, crunching his way through several bags of processed food and currently sucking orange Dorito dust from his fingers. Adam watched him, as though in a dream.

“Sexy,” he commented, at last.

Ronan stopped, fingertip still in his mouth, and a grin slowly began to spread around it. He deliberately finished the job, nibbling at his thumb, and then showed Adam his questionably clean hands. “We can do sexy if you want.”

Adam wasn’t in a rush. He thought he might never be in a rush again. Time seemed to stretch out before him, interminable, when not so long ago he’d thought his had run dry. All those pathways he could still tread. Possibilities. Freedom. “Do you feel any different?”

He meant, now that you know who you are. What you are.

Ronan rubbed his hands on his new, clean sweatpants and sat back against the headboard. “Yeah,” he said. “No. I just feel like… me.”

Adam understood.

He turned against the headboard, and Ronan did the same, so that they were facing each other again.

“Do you feel any different?” asked Ronan, and Adam could see that it was costing him something to ask. “I mean about… me.”

“You mean,” said Adam. “About the revelation that I’m actually dating a massive Eldritch horror in disguise? I think I’m handling it pretty well, actually.”

Ronan’s lips twitched.

“However,” continued Adam. “If you make any of the terrible jokes about monsterfucking that I know you’ve got brewing inside that head of yours, I may have to reconsider.”

Ronan snorted, and ducked his head, bashfully. Adam took the opportunity to trace his finger delicately along the intricate lines of sweetmetal ink still healing on his arm. Ronan’s lifeline, a snakeskin sleeve. Unbelievably realistic, the way the green scales shimmered. Almost unbearably sexy. He supposed he had Hennessy to thank for that, too.

Ronan watched the path of his fingertips, his skin goosebumping beneath them, and swallowed. “Adam,” he said. “When I thought you were gone…”

An errant tear slid from his cheek. He could not finish the sentence.

But Adam understood. Here, in the human world, some things needed to be said out loud. “You made the right choice,” Adam said. “You made the only choice.” The bubble of a disbelieving laugh escaped him. “Ronan, you saved the fucking world.”

Ronan let out a huff, and then a long, slow exhale.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

Adam moved toward him.

In the sweetmetal sea, they had been one. Adam’s thoughts were Ronan’s thoughts, Ronan’s feelings were Adam’s feelings. This was that; no words required. This was all the time in the world; this was understanding; this was not Adam-and-Ronan, Ronan-and-Adam but one entity, containing both of them.

This was that, but this was also just so human. This was Adam, tracing a finger along Ronan’s cheek, memorizing the path his tear had fallen. This was Ronan, closing his eyes and swallowing; this was Adam, closing the rest of the distance between them, brushing his nose against Ronan’s, breathing in, breathing out. This was the whisper of Ronan’s fingers along his arm, excruciatingly slow, devastatingly tender and this was Adam, pressing dry lips to Ronan’s warm ones, tasting salt and Doritos, and realizing he was hungry, he was hungry.

This was a kiss to end all kisses, and another, and another, because they could have as many as they wanted: these kisses were exponential, they were only going to multiply.

This was Ronan’s unfiltered gasp as Adam’s mouth found his jawline, his neck, as hands crept beneath fabric, unrepentant, undressing. This was Adam’s trembling fingers as they dipped between skin and elastic waistband, every part of him aching with want, aching to touch and be touched. This was Ronan, pulling him nearer, begging to be shown that Adam was still here, that he was still here, still human, that they still got to have this, to have each other, every way that they could.

This was prayer.

This was fingertips bruising into hips, marks bitten into skin, limbs intertwined as close as they could be on this plane, in this place, in this life. This was rapturous and loving; euphoric and weighty with all that had transpired, all they had lost and all they had sacrificed and all they had given, and this, this was a gift. This was something to treasure.

Adam found, in the midst of it all, that he was laughing. Or maybe it was Ronan who was. They kissed, and kissed, and kissed again.

In the quiet afterward, they lay together and listened to the muted traffic of the highway, the drunken shouts of the parking lot. Adam traced the snakeskin lines of Ronan’s arm.

“I don’t think the nightwash is going to bother you anymore,” Adam said.

Ronan looked surprised, as though he hadn’t considered the possibility.

“Which means you won't have to stay at the Barns anymore,” Adam continued, carefully. “Where will you go?”

Ronan flopped onto his back. A slow smile spread across his face.

“Anywhere.”

There was so much possibility in that one simple word.

“I think I want to leave,” Adam said. “Boston,” he added, when Ronan eyed him. “It's not Harvard, for me. It's never been Harvard.”

Ronan was still looking at him. “Where will you go?”

Adam looked back.

“Anywhere.”

Ronan, who was fully grinning now, sat up, sending pillows flying. “Let's fucking go, then!”

“Hold on,” said Adam. “There are still a few weeks left in the semester. I'm not giving up these credits, I’m gonna need them for transfers.”

The look on Ronan’s face was impossibly fond.

“Fucking Parrish,” he said. “Am I still banned from campus?”

“Yes,” Adam said. “But that’s okay. I don’t mind having a certified badass for a boyfriend. Good for clout.”

Ronan tackled him then, and Adam laughed, and they wrestled until the sheets were in knots and the rest of the pillows hit the floor and both of them were thinking about doing a good bit more than wrestling once again.

Instead, something made Ronan pause. His eyes had caught on Adam’s naked wrist, where he had it pinned to the mattress.

Adam sat up as Ronan disappeared into the bathroom, emerging a moment later with the softly glowing dreamwatch in his hands.

Of course, thought Adam. It had been on Ronan’s wrist when they arrived.

Ronan stood beside the bed, hesitant, his voice unsure.

“I know things were different, when you…” he said, drifting off, unwilling or unable to finish the sentence. The watch in his hands was a question.

When Ronan had first offered the dreamwatch to him, unceremoniously shoving it at him in the firelight of the Barns’ living room, after Declan and Matthew had long since called it a Christmas eve and gone to bed, Adam had been overwhelmed by the meaning of it. Think of me, but also, be with me, be my lover, even when we’re apart. He’d responded as best he could at the time, by willing all he was feeling into the most breathless kiss he’d ever given, but Adam understood now that Ronan needed more than that.

He stood up, and took Ronan’s face in his hands.

“Ronan Lynch, listen to me. I am telling you this with words because I can no longer telepathically transmit this to you and I want to be sure that you still know it's true.”

Ronan looked at him, wide-eyed.

“I am choosing to be with you because you are what I want most in the world. I don't care if it's difficult or if it's easy or if we're in the same place or halfway across the world from each other. I don't care if you're a dream or a dreamer or a monster from another realm or if you have any magic left in you at all.” Adam took a breath. Ronan’s chest moved up and down, up and down. “Tamquam alter idem. Those aren’t empty words to me. You’re my second self. You’re my other half. You’re it for me. Do you get it?”

Ronan, still wide-eyed and held fast, slowly nodded.

“Now,” said Adam. “This was a gift, and I never should have given it back. I’m sorry I did.” He moved his hands to cup Ronan’s, which still cupped the dreamwatch. “Will you let me wear it again?”

With shaking hands, Ronan fastened the watch around Adam’s wrist. With shaking breath, he pressed his forehead to Adam’s forehead. With shaking hearts, they stood together, and just let this moment be.

*

It wasn't all like that, of course.

Adam woke again, this time to weak winter morning light. The bed was unfamiliar, but the body beside him wasn’t. Ronan was awake, eyes open, staring blankly at the ceiling.

In his hands he held a tattered photograph, three children laughing, playing in the rain. The brothers Lynch.

Adam waited until Ronan swallowed, blinked, was free to move again. He kept on staring at the ceiling. Adam tucked himself into Ronan’s shoulder, not to overwhelm, but to reassure, pressing gently against his side.

He knew the thought that was haunting Ronan. If Bryde had survived, then Matthew might have too. If Bryde had survived, then Matthew might have too.

If Bryde had survived…

Adam, before, might have taken this thought and run with it, analyzed from every logical angle, drowned it in practicality. Adam, now, understood that this would not be helpful.

"I think it's time to go home," he said, instead.

Ronan's fingers were white on the photograph. "Yeah," he said, finally. "Yeah."

Adam wondered, perhaps, if the amount of grief one person could be expected to hold was a finite thing. Not that the loss of Matthew was any smaller or less significant than the loss of Ronan's parents—by many measures, it was greater—but maybe once you reached capacity, you simply could not find it in yourself to hold any more. Or maybe it was that Ronan had simply had so much practice at grief that he could hold it and still find it in himself to laugh, to love, to pick himself up and keep going. Adam thought of what Ronan had said, as he helped him to his feet in the park—it will have to be enough.

Adam searched inside himself for his own grief, for the loss he should be feeling. Matthew Lynch, the easiest Lynch brother to love. It simply did not seem real.

Perhaps they were both holding on to foolish hope.

His phone buzzed then, from where it was plugged into the new charger on the dresser. Buzzed again.

They looked at each other, and then Adam reluctantly peeled himself away to answer.

“Adam?” came Fletcher’s full-throated voice. His roommate sounded a good deal more shrill than usual. “I know you’re uh, probably busy, and I know you don’t want to hear from me, and all that, but uh, I just need to ask you—”

The next part was screeched so loud that Adam knew Ronan could hear it clear across the room. And Fletcher wasn’t the only one that was screeching.

“Why is there a massive black bird flying circles around our room?!”

As one, their eyes widened, and Adam and Ronan dissolved into fits.

*

Ronan waited in the dormitory parking lot while Adam went to fetch Chainsaw, and pack a quick bag. He was not surprised to find the entire Crying Club waiting in prime form in the hallway outside his room. Gillian, in particular, looked fit to burst.

“Hey guys,” he said, weakly. He was not sure if he was entirely up to this conversation, in his present condition. He’d already had to make Ronan pull over so he could empty his stomach by the side of the highway after he'd optimistically eaten an Egg McMuffin on the way back into the city. Through the door he could hear Chainsaw, thumping and screeching about, clearly outraged at being trapped in such a small and uninspiring space. “Please tell me she hasn’t trashed the room again at least.”

“Adam,” said Gillian with exasperation.

“I’m sorry, Fletcher,” he said, attempting to head her off. “I shouldn’t have left her in there. Or, I should have told you about her, at least.”

Fletcher was slightly more composed now than he had been on the phone. “It’s not—well it is—but it’s not about the bird, Adam.”

Adam looked around at them, the game pieces he’d collected in his efforts to convince himself he belonged here: colourful, queer, each with problems and wishes and dreams of their own. They looked at him, in various stages of confusion and genuine concern. They weren’t bad folks, really. They just weren’t his people.

“I’m not who you think I am,” Adam said. “I’ve been lying to you all since the day we met. I’m here on a scholarship. I grew up in a trailer park and I’m deaf in this ear because my dad beat the shit out of me on the regular. Until Ronan stopped him. Until I stopped him, in the end, by leaving.”

His friends had fallen deathly silent.

“Ronan’s not who you think he is, either,” Adam continued. “Because I lied about him, too. He’s not a drunk, and he’s not cruel. In fact, he’s a goddamn hero. And he’s the love of my fucking life.”

Eliot and Benjy looked at each other.

“I am sorry, for lying, and for not being a good friend to you. You guys deserve better than that.”

He turned, and cautiously pushed open the door. Thankfully, the room looked intact, but Chainsaw let out a cry and dove straight for him from where she’d been flying circles around the ceiling. The others gasped and ducked and covered their heads, but Adam reached out and she landed on his arm, scolding him, flapping a bit before she settled. Her talons gripped him a bit more tightly than she might have ordinarily done.

He stroked her beak, and she turned her head to let him.

“Atom,” she said.

“I’m sorry, girl,” he said to her quietly. “Didn’t mean for you to wake up all alone. But just wait til you see who I’ve got waiting for you in the parking lot.”

He lifted her up to his shoulder, and she stayed there, balancing gently, as he threw some clean t-shirts and jeans into a bag. He looked at the notes on his desk, and after a moment, stuffed them in too. He had some emails to professors to send, and some sucking up to do if he wanted to keep those credits, but that could wait. He stood up to face the Crying Club, who’d been whispering furiously among themselves.

“I can’t explain everything that’s been going on,” he said. “And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I just need a few more days, then I’ll be back. But I’m leaving Harvard, once the semester is done. I’ve never really been happy here.” He looked around to each of them in turn. “And you’ve never needed me, even if you thought you did. You’re gonna be just fine. You’ve got each other.”

They moved aside, keeping a wide berth from Chainsaw, so he could pass. As he did, Fletcher cleared his throat.

“I might have liked to get to know the real Adam Parrish,” he said. “Maybe when you come back, there’ll still be time.”

Adam stopped, considered, and then chanced a true smile. “Yeah. Maybe there will.”

*

Man and bird were equally overjoyed to be reunited, properly, at last. Chainsaw flew around Ronan in figure eights, darting in and out as though she could hardly believe he was real. Ronan, when she finally settled enough for him to hold her, pressed his face into her feathers and shuddered with relief.

They drove next to the autobody shop, where the sight of Ronan and his raven caused something of a stir.

“Hey guys,” Adam said. “This is my boyfriend Ronan. We just came by to pick something up.”

His boss wasn’t in, so Adam left a note on his desk to apologize for his absence and ask for the rest of the week off, to deal with a family emergency. Then he strode over to the hidden corridor, moved a stack of spark plugs aside, and opened the door.

“What the fuck?” he heard someone say. Ronan leaned against the wall and smirked.

Adam retrieved his messenger bag, thankfully undisturbed, and touched his tarot cards for reassurance. They hummed at him, warm, welcoming. Awake. He returned to the shop, and grinned at Mitchell, who was staring at him, agape.

“I left my bike down the street a bit,” Adam said. “If I roll it in here, you guys can keep it safe for the week, you think?” He was leaving Harvard. He was leaving Boston. He'd have to give his notice here, but not quite yet.

“Yeah, sure,” said Mitchell, narrowing his eyes. “You sound different, Parrish.”

“Yeah,” said Adam. “I reckon I do.”

*

They had Jordan’s number; she had inked it onto Adam's arm with a Sharpie before they’d split. They picked her up at Fenway Studios, a massive brick-and-glass building with a historical plaque beside the ornate front door. She had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and an oversized art portfolio over the other.

Ronan, far removed now from that sunny, breathless afternoon in the Esplanade, leaned against his mostly-invisible car, looking uninterested in her arrival, but Adam could see the wariness beneath, when they saw that she was alone.

Jordan looked just as warily at the car as Adam opened the trunk for her.

“No one’s stopping to look, huh?” she said. “Everybody just going about their business, as you roll in with this James Bond bullshit and park on a double line?”

“Drives like a dream,” said Ronan. Chainsaw, perched on his shoulder, shook her feathers as he opened the driver’s door.

Adam took the duffel from Jordan’s shoulder.

“You were there with me," he said. "Weren't you? With my body, I mean. In the Charlotte Club.”

She looked at him, and said nothing. They had both been taken and held against their will. They had both had their autonomy violated, but only she had been awake for it.

Adam hurried on to say, “Humans can only go three days without water. I was away from my body for longer than that.”

A bit of the tension left Jordan’s forehead. “Sugar water. I got as much into you as I could, while I was still awake.”

“Thank you,” Adam said, sincerely. “I really do owe Jordan Hennessy a lot.”

Jordan’s lips twitched.

He offered up the front seat, which she declined, to Ronan’s visible relief. “Where is Hennessy, anyway?” Adam asked, because Ronan wouldn’t, twisting around in the front while Ronan navigated the afternoon Boston traffic with questionable efficiency and a lot of swearing. “I would have thought she’d be with you.”

“We’re not so inseparable nowadays,” Jordan said, but there was no bitterness in her voice. “She’s looking after Farooq-Lane. They wouldn’t let anyone in to see her, so we did up some quick IDs. And a marriage certificate.”

Ronan’s eyebrows lifted imperceptibly, as though he was impressed but not surprised.

“Oh,” said Adam, who was a bit surprised. “Are they… a thing?”

Nothing he had gleaned from Ronan’s limited experience with Farooq-Lane had indicated this.

“Well,” said Jordan. “Depends how you define thing, I suppose. Farooq-Lane is going to be fine, by the way, since no one asked.”

“How do you define thing?” Ronan asked, suddenly.

“I’m sorry?” said Jordan.

“Or maybe I mean,” Ronan said. “How does my brother define thing?”

“Lynch,” said Adam.

“I don’t know,” said Jordan, her voice a little chillier. “You’ll have to ask him. Have you heard from him yet?”

Ronan was silent. “No,” he said.

They’d tried to call, of course. Declan’s number was out of service, which was the worrisome thing. Who was Declan without his phone? Ronan had seen, which meant Adam had seen, his brother’s face, the look in his eyes as he’d given him that very final-sounding blessing. And Ronan had seen him get shot.

But then Hennessy had said that Declan had been the one to give Farooq-Lane the sweetmetal ink that had saved Ronan’s life.

Be dangerous.

“You make sweetmetals,” Ronan said, suddenly.

“Yeah?” she said, warily.

“I used them to travel. To see things, when I was…” Ronan trailed off. “Wherever the fuck. In the other place. They were like… windows. Kinda.”

Adam, who did not feel as though he should turn around to look as Jordan chewed on this, stayed silent.

“Windows…” Jordan said. “Do you mean… were you spying on me, asshole? Were you spying on us?”

“Okay, now you sound like Hennessy,” Ronan said. “And yeah. I guess so. But not on purpose. I don’t know, man, I was drifting around, I didn’t know what was happening!”

“See anything you liked?”

“Gross,” said Ronan, with utmost sincerity. “No, thank sweet baby Jesus, apparently you lovebirds are too boring for that kind of hetero bullshit.”

Jordan made a noise of indignation from the backseat.

“I did hear him propose, though.”

Adam’s eyebrows skyrocketed into his hair at that.

Jordan was silent for a moment. “Technically,” she said. “He’s only ever proposed that he was going to propose.”

“Now that’s some hetero bullshit,” said Ronan, but there was a laugh in his voice, and when Adam chanced a look back, Jordan was smiling; a small, private smile.

*

Declan, it turned out, was intact, and at the Barns, as they’d hoped, after first stopping to check the cold and darkened apartment in D.C. He was dressed in sweatpants, moving gingerly, and utterly phoneless, as un-Declanlike as it was possible to be.

Un-Declanlike, too, when he wrapped his arms around Jordan and pressed his face into her hair. Adam was beginning to suspect that he might need to recalibrate his definition of Declanlike.

But Declan was not alone.

The gunshot wound had a hell of a story behind it, and though Declan would never tell it, the new Fenian was happy to oblige as they sat around the table, familiar and yet made strange with these new occupants and their out-of-place familiarity. Despite what Ronan had seen, Adam was tempted to believe that the man who both was and wasn’t Ronan’s father was embellishing the tale—Declan’s one-man, desperate last stand against the magical mob—but when he looked at Declan, listening but unresponsive, resigned, he understood that it was all quite true.

Ronan listened to the new Fenian speak with a complicated look upon his face. He would not look at Mór Ó Corra.

Adam had known Aurora Lynch, and this woman was nothing like her: wry and unyielding where Aurora had been loving and free; complicated where Aurora had been simple. The new Fenian, though, was a storyteller, his voice lyrical, hypnotic. It was a glimpse of the future, as if the Ronan that Adam had seen in that other place, when he had seen all the pathways they could travel together, sat before him now: just as handsome, but in a lived-in way, creases around the eyes, wisdom gained through years, through choices, through life lived, one way or another.

Adam, who knew a great deal about Niall Lynch, though only through Ronan’s eyes, or Gansey’s, thought he understood, now, a great deal more about the Lynch brothers than he had before.

Declan stood, suddenly, his chair scraping against the floorboards.

Ronan followed him into the hall. Adam and Jordan exchanged looks, and joined them from a respectful distance.

“It doesn’t matter what I did after,” Declan said. “I failed him. I didn’t protect him.” “Fuck you,” Ronan said immediately. “I didn’t protect him. I made him, and then I left you to clean up the mess.” “Matthew wasn’t a mess,” said Declan, frowning.

“Of course he fucking was,” Ronan said. “So am I. So are you. But he was our mess, and we did our best with him, and we fucked up, and now what the fuck are we gonna do?”

Declan’s hands were braced against his gunshot wound. He raised his eyes to his brother.

Adam thought of the fourth of July, fireworks and Matthew’s whoops; Declan’s reluctant smile and Ronan’s curses as he burned his fingers on the fuse. He thought of Christmas eve at the Barns, half-cooked turkey and arguments over the Charlie Brown Christmas tree they’d sledged from the nearby woods. He thought of the way Matthew delightedly draped himself over the couch to show him some incomprehensible meme, Ronan shoving him playfully away with his foot. He thought of Declan’s frustrating, reassuring, steady presence, made father to his brothers at the age of eighteen, maybe even long before that, how very different that Declan looked from the Declan that stood before them now. Adam thought of three boys in suits, emerging from St. Agnes every Sunday, no matter what.

The Lynch brothers, incomplete. There was no answer to be had.

Ronan was quiet that night, as they lay together in his childhood bed.

Adam looked at Ronan's faraway eyes and wondered what he was thinking. But he also didn't have to wonder, because Adam had been embroidered through the fabric of Ronan's mind and how it worked and what he felt and Adam knew, right now, that Ronan was swept up in all of it: the reappearance of the people who both were and weren’t his parents; his newfound understanding of Declan and all he had given of himself for their family; the loss of Matthew, which he could barely turn his face to; the mending with Adam, all they had been, all they were now, all they could be; the act of reconciling the answers he had always looked for with everything he now knew about himself: they brought clarity and confusion in equal measures. They brought new questions. All the same, they brought a certain peace.

Ronan's eyes focused, and they focused on Adam. Adam reached out, to gently draw a thumb across his cheek. Really, he thought. This would give them a bit of an unfair advantage, as far as relationships go.

“You know Boudicca’s not done with you yet,” said Adam, reluctant to add more to Ronan’s racing mind, but the thought had been circling him since he’d heard the new Fenian’s tale, and it had to be addressed. “Not after what Declan did. Not after what you did. They’re going to find out, if they haven’t already. I don’t know if you can keep the Barns a secret forever. If they find out what you’re capable of—”

“If they find out what I’m capable of,” said Ronan, and there was danger in his voice. “They’ll understand that it’s in their best interest to leave us the fuck alone.”

So Adam gathered his tarot cards and a scrying bowl, and joined him in his dreams that night. Lindenmere had sensed Ronan’s mood—it had become dangerous, too, all shadows and scrabbling creatures, a moonless witching hour. Because it was a dream, Adam could see well enough, but he could not have said where the light was coming from.

Ronan stood before him, in the center of a mushroom fairy ring, and opened his hands. Adam could sense the power gathering to him, as though it had been waiting for him to call. There was nothing tentative or uncertain about it. This was Ronan, in full form and full control of his dreaming, and Adam, momentarily, was awed.

Be dangerous, Declan had told him. But he hadn’t known the full scope of what Ronan, dangerous, could be.

Adam looked at the man he loved and saw the creature beneath, and he loved it too. Ronan had chosen humanity, all of the good and the bad and the ugly and the transcendent, but he would always be of two worlds, always finding the balance between them. Adam could see the thread of this path, unwinding before him: Ronan’s rage at his brother’s death, his fierce protectiveness of those he loved. He saw it spiral into death and destruction and a precipice Adam was not sure if Ronan could return from.

So he strode into the middle of the fairy ring and kissed him.

Ronan’s mouth opened in surprise, but Adam did not break the kiss. He put one hand on either side of Ronan’s face and held him there, firm, until he felt the gathering power dissipate, and Ronan’s familiar hands on his ribs.

He stepped back, and Ronan looked a bit dazed.

“Parrish?”

“Show them your power,” Adam said. “But only a threat. Something only a dreamer could make. Only a dreamer like you.”

Ronan blinked at him. Above them, moonlight, peeking through clouds. Buds appeared on branches, grew into leaves, turned a lusty gold, withered again.

“Will that be enough?” Ronan asked.

“The more you leave to their imaginations,” Adam said. “The better.” Then he smiled. “They’ll know not to fuck with the Lynches. You’re off-limits.”

Ronan took a breath, chest rising, nodded, and took Adam’s hands. “We’re off-limits.”

Adam’s heart swelled. This time, he kept his hands in Ronan’s as his power gathered around them.

*

The new Fenian and Mór Ó Corra left the next day, with the thing that Ronan had dreamed, their promise of a peaceful life.

“He’s not Dad.”

That was Ronan, shoulders tense, familiar in the twilight as Adam emerged from the house. He was watching the taillights leave.

“I know that,” said Declan, tiredly. “But she is my mother.”

Ronan did not like this, but he took a breath before saying, “She’s not my mother.”

“She's as much your parent as Dad was,” Declan said. “They dreamed you together. She's the only reason you've been awake all these years since he died.”

Ronan was silent for a moment. Eyes still on the now-empty drive, he said, “Dad stayed.”

It was another long moment before Declan spoke. “Fair enough.”

Early the next morning, Ronan drove to the end of the driveway and drove back again, with Jordan and Declan in tow. The eldest brothers Lynch were quiet, but it was the most peaceful quiet Adam had ever heard between them.

And the day after that, Matthew walked through the kitchen door.

*

Matthew began his story with: “Are you going to be quiet?”

They stayed up late, because they were awake, and they were alive. Ronan hauled the barbeque out of the shed and they ate hot dogs and burgers like it was fully summertime instead of barely spring. They called Gansey and Blue and let their shrieking joy shrink the miles between them. They lit a fire in the living room and toasted things on sticks while Jordan painted bright patterns into the stones surrounding it. Their laughter was loud, like it had been rationed and finite before, and only now that Matthew was here was it allowed to be full-bodied. They gathered and listened to Matthew’s tale of hitch-hiking from Boston, a series of serendipitous misadventures that somehow turned out well on the merit of his golden-haired lovability alone, but that was just the way the world worked for Matthew.

Matthew Lynch was not yet the storyteller his father was, but he had a charm all his own. Ronan couldn’t take his eyes off him, shining and fond. Jordan, paint-spattered, had happily tucked herself in between Matthew and Declan on the worn living room couch, as though she’d always belonged there. Declan looked loose and unedited in his delight, like he’d been wearing a mask all along, and now had decided he didn’t need it anymore.

Adam, for his part, was remembering another day at the Barns, hot dogs and a celebratory mood, feeling fuzzy and unlike himself, learning what it meant to be happy, understanding what it meant to love. Beginning to know what it could be to be all of yourself, to show all of yourself, to trust all of yourself with someone else.

He realized that he had not once, all night, thought about which Adam he should be: the careful persona he tended to construct around Declan, the rare but calculated humour in his comments, the measured-in-millimetres quirk to his mouth. He was just being, here with Ronan and his brothers and his someday-sister-in-law, in this comfortable place that was as familiar to him as any place had ever been. He was Adam Parrish, singular, whole, and felt no need to be anything else.

It struck him then, what this was.

This was family.

It was very early hours when Declan and Jordan bid them good night, later still when Matthew flopped his way up the stairs. Adam and Ronan leaned together on the couch, Adam’s head tucked into Ronan’s neck, their fingertips pressed together, watching the way their hands flickered in the firelight.

They were happy.

Matthew’s return—Matthew, alive—was a gift they might have hoped for, but hadn’t counted on, not really, not after all these days. The Lynch brothers three were reunited, in more ways than one. Ronan was free to choose his path, no longer chained to the Barns, no longer mired in the question of who he was, what he was. And Adam—Adam felt like he was seeing perfectly clearly for the first time in his life.

He had a stack of college brochures he’d dug out from last year waiting for him in Ronan’s bedroom, and he wasn’t intimidated in the slightest.

He’d laid claim to Adam Parrish in all of his facets, and stitched back together the truest of them.

He wasn’t ashamed of himself. He was proud. The boy from the trailer park was becoming a man who understood the power of his own choices, his own autonomy—even from his past, even from the path—the prison—he’d built for himself.

Where was home now? It wasn’t Harvard. It wasn’t Henrietta. Being here at the Barns nourished him, but Adam was beginning to understand that that wasn’t the only answer, either.

“Ronan?” he said, into the firelight. He sat up, and turned to him. “I love you.”

They usually said it in other ways, ways that felt right and true and real to them and always would, but right here, right now, just this once, Adam didn't feel the need to dress it up in a secret language or sarcasm or vulgar terms of endearment. It was a truth, simple and profound all at once.

Ronan searched his face, his eyes, and seemed to understand. He brought his hands to Adam’s face, and swallowed hard before he spoke. These words on Ronan’s tongue were unfamiliar, and all the more sweeter for it; honest. Heartfelt.

“I love you, Adam Parrish.”

Adam mirrored him, sliding hands up his chest to his face, pulling him closer. They hung in the moment before the kiss, breathing in each other’s breath, savouring the shape of the moment, the anticipation of it, the truth and the feeling it held. When their lips touched, it felt like an electric shock, a warm sigh, a surprised laugh. It felt like a universe bundled up in a snowglobe, a star going supernova. Like the first sip of coffee in the morning, like a hot water bottle on the coldest night of the year. It felt like everything life could be, the good and the difficult and the whimsical and the profound, wrapped into one kiss, one promise, one moment that could be spun into a thousand more.

They kissed, and they kissed, and they kissed, and then Adam let his hands wander, down Ronan’s shoulders, the curve of his back, creeping up his thighs.

“Don’t get fresh, Parrish,” Ronan said, playfully slapping him away, and then pulling Adam into his lap instead. “We don’t have the Barns all to ourselves anymore. And there’s a lot of fuckin’ people in the house right now.”

Adam groaned, and bent to nuzzle at his neck. “Now you’re gonna do the Catholic guilt thing? Right now?”

“What do you mean?” said Ronan, although he was clearly distracted. “Catholics can fuck. How do you think they get all those big-ass Irish families? Pretty sure it’s the Protestants you’re thinking of.”

“I have questions about your understanding of theology,” said Adam, but at that moment Ronan rolled his hips, and he quite forgot what they were.

Adam understood it, at last, when he felt Ronan’s breath on his ear, Ronan’s hand pressed to his chest, to his heart. When they moved together, when Ronan shuddered beneath him, when Adam saw stars and Ronan held him fast.

This was home. The Barns, the road, some anonymous hotel room. Wherever he was. Wherever they were together.

They lay together, so tangled up they may as well have been one, Adam-and-Ronan, Ronan-and-Adam. The fire was only embers now, reflected in Ronan’s eyes. He looked blissfully happy, peacefully sated. Powerful. Pensive.

“Fuck,” he said, with feeling. “We're gonna be okay.”

And Adam believed him.

Chapter Text

SOMETIME AFTER FOUR YEARS LATER

The morning was dawning cool and bright, as Adam Parrish and Ronan Lynch slipped from their bedroom at the Barns to go for a drive.

They didn’t speak, as the BMW hugged a mountain road made only for them, windows down, music up. The sky, as they drove, grew to a luminous, deep blue, stars still visible in its darkest corner. Ronan kept his eyes on the road, and Adam kept his hand on Ronan’s. Stains of purple, then pink and orange began to announce the sun’s arrival, just as they pulled into the lookout with a showy crunch of gravel.

Now that the car was still, the Virginia morning was quiet. They climbed onto the hood of the car, still damp with condensation, so they could watch the sun rise.

They weren’t teenagers anymore, one angry and bristling, one walled up tight, fumbling their way into love when neither of them had been taught how to do it properly. The lonesome boy in the trailer park, who thought love was tiptoed glances and downcast eyes. The dreamer who felt it fiercely but who’d only ever been offered it all tangled up in secrets.

They weren’t teenagers anymore, kings of Henrietta: invincible, unbreakable, brilliant, foolish, ferociously loyal, desperate to prove themselves, all of it urgent and loud. They weren’t teenagers anymore, foundering once the quest had given way, trying to find their footing, to fit themselves into molds they were only ever meant to break.

Adam was not ashamed of the boy he'd been. Every choice he’d made, every path he’d walked, had led him to this moment, this life, this day.

He looked at Ronan. They weren’t teenagers anymore.

They were men, one with a career and one with a calling, and they were lovers, each utterly dismantled for the other, more than most could claim. They were as human as they were uncanny; they lived on the edge of this world and that. They walked ley lines by day and watched dumb movies by night; they still burned dinner more often than not; and with every day that passed, each of them grew, slowly, steadily, more comfortable in their skin, in the people they were, in the people they were becoming. They had saved the world, once, and now they saved lives, no less important—one dreamer, one visionary, one human at a time.

Today, in the promise of the morning light, the world felt just as big and bright as it had that starry summer night when Ronan had first offered Adam a ring.

Ronan looked back at him, Adam’s thoughts reflected in his eyes, and then knocked their shoulders together roughly. “Aren’t we supposed to not see each other this morning?” he asked, leaning back against the windshield. “Bad luck or some shit?”

Adam leaned back beside Ronan, ignoring the dampness seeping through his shirt, elbowing him. “You worried about bad luck all of a sudden?”

Ronan scoffed. His fingers toyed with the ring on Adam’s own. A smile toyed with his lips.

“With you?” His eyes flicked up to Adam’s. “Never.”

Adam felt something warm begin, deep in his belly, spreading through his core.

“We’ve never been much for rules,” he said. “Reckon I don’t see why we should start following them now.”

They pressed together, side-by-side on the car, side-by-side in the slanted light, side-by-side on this path they were taking, the one they were choosing together.

Adam caught Ronan’s fingers in his now, and traced the place where his wedding band would be. Ronan watched him do it, something soft and big and too much for words upon his face.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Adam said, after a while. “But I kinda wish we’d already done it. All this ceremony just feels like a formality.”

“And deprive Sargent of the chance to pontificate about same-sex divorce statistics? How could we?”

Adam groaned and put his face in his hands. “Oh god. I didn’t think you were listening last night when she went on about all the research she’d done… are you sure we shouldn’t have chosen Hennessy instead?”

“Hennessy,” said Ronan solemnly. “Wouldn’t have rested until she had eviscerated us both thoroughly before the vows were even said. It wouldn’t be a sermon, it would be a roast.”

“You’re right,” Adam said. “Is it too late to elope?”

“Having second thoughts, Parrish?”

Ronan’s voice did not betray true fear, only fondness, and a sort of peace: he was right where he was supposed to be.

They weren’t teenagers anymore.

Adam smiled. “You know what I mean.”

Ronan pressed his face into Adam’s neck.

“I do.”

Adam measured his breaths, so they aligned with Ronan’s. A hawk called out, far overhead. “We could just tell everyone we’ve actually been married for years. Metaphysically speaking.”

“Ah, but then Gansey will have us on the legalese. Dunno if melding the fabric of your very souls together in the sweetmetal sea counts in a court of law.”

Adam sighed, indulgently. “I guess we’re just gonna have to go through with it, then.”

“Guess so.”

Ronan sat up, and they looked at each other, nose to nose. Adam tapped his finger lightly on the end of Ronan’s.

“Husband,” he said.

Ronan’s ears turned bright red. “Fuck you,” he said. “You’re not allowed to say that yet.”

“Love of my life,” Adam continued, as Ronan squirmed. “Father of my future children. Mr. and Mr. Parrish-Lynch, how’s that?”

This quickly devolved into a wrestling match, which Ronan did not try very hard to win. Adam pinned him easily to the windshield. “Mr. and Mr. Lynch-Parrish?” Ronan tried, and then immediately looked like he’d swallowed a lemon, to Adam’s delight.

“You’re gonna have to stand there in front of all those people and hold my hands,” Adam said, teasing, as Ronan half-heartedly struggled. “You’re gonna have to say all those sappy things and make all those vows out loud… you’re gonna have to kiss me! Nobody’s ever gonna think you’re a badass again. It’s over for you, Lynch.”

“Shit. Fuck,” Ronan said, smiling. “What have I done?”

He wrapped his leg around Adam’s, and used the leverage to flip them both.

“You’re gonna have to do all that shit too, dumbass.”

Adam grinned, pinned at the wrists. “I’ve made my peace with it.”

His stomach swooped as Ronan bent over him, his breath tickling Adam’s lips, his eyes bright and clear.

“I can’t fucking wait,” Ronan said.

Adam surged up to kiss him, his lover-partner-fiancé-best friend, his past-present-future, his choice, always, always, his choice.

“Tamquam,” he said, when they broke the kiss, when Ronan pressed their foreheads together, when they breathed into one another like that was all the air they’d ever need.

“Alter idem,” Ronan said, and then, tentatively, he added, “Husband.”

Adam liked the sound of it so much that the grooms, to no one’s surprise, were late to their own wedding.

*

The second Lynch brother’s wedding was even more exclusive than the first. It was held within the boundaries of Lindenmere, so only those who were known to Lindenmere came: Ronan’s brothers—one to stand beside him, and one to bear the rings. Gansey, to stand for Adam, and Blue, who was delighted to officiate (and pontificate). Jordan and Hennessy and Carmen, to bear witness; and Opal, of course, to scatter flower petals in the breeze while Chainsaw shouted her joy overhead.

Adam dressed well by anyone’s standards, but most importantly his own, and Ronan dressed all in black. The rings were simple, a matched set; they’d designed them together in a dream. Dark like smoke, and bright like gold, a little bit of magic, of course, for all their comings and goings: a warmth, maybe, a pulse, a presence; and only when necessary, a little tug to say you’re needed, you’re wanted, you’re never far away.

Lindenmere was at its most beautiful, itself a dream of falling leaves and gently waving vines, summer-like but not quite, perfectly shaded, peaceful, serene. Magical. When Adam and Ronan stood, hands in hands and vows voiced aloud, they had eyes only for each other, and their voices shook with the wonder of it all. The moment both stretched into eternity and was over too soon, a perfect little capsule of time, a memory that would linger, even while others faded.

After the vows and the cheers and the food and the fire and the laughter was done, their guests —that is to say, their family—trickled off to bed, two by two. The newlyweds, the dreamer and the magician, climbed up to the roof of one of the barns as they had done the night of the eldest Lynch’s wedding, to look at the stars and dream. But this time they sat, carefully balanced, cross-legged, and looked at each other instead.

Ronan's palms were upturned, his thumbs stroking Adam's palms. And Adam, who had been all around and through Ronan's memories and his feelings and his hopes and his dreams, had a moment of prescience, be it psychic or connection, where he found he already knew what Ronan was going to say. He considered the implications of it, what it might mean about time and circles and soulmates and inevitability, what it might mean about them. And he found that it didn’t scare him at all. It didn’t change a thing.

He’d choose this, no matter what.

Adam let the noise fade, so he could listen, as if for the first time.

“Ever since I was a kid,” Ronan began. “I've had this dream.”